


Comatose

by prepare4trouble



Category: Red Dwarf (UK TV)
Genre: Apologies, Because Rimmer really needs a hug, Being a hologram is incredibly frustrating, Claustrophobia, Coma, Drinking, Drunken Kissing, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Friendship, Guilt for Past Actions, Head Injury, Hugs, Hurt Dave Lister, Kissing, Kryten Loves Laundry, M/M, Needles, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Platonic Bed Sharing, Pre-Slash, References to Depression, Seizures, Series 4-5, Sharing a Bed, Threats, Touch-Starved
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-25
Updated: 2020-07-20
Packaged: 2021-03-01 22:35:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 19
Words: 45,551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23840872
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prepare4trouble/pseuds/prepare4trouble
Summary: After being whacked over the head by a deranged simulant on an abandoned ship, Lister wakes up to find that he is a hologram.
Relationships: Dave Lister & Arnold Rimmer, Dave Lister/Arnold Rimmer
Comments: 139
Kudos: 158





	1. Chapter 1

“Listy...”

Lister heard the voice, a hissed whisper, penetrate the comfort of his sleep. He ignored it.

“Wakey wakey!”

The voice was louder this time, and unmistakably Rimmer’s. Lister fought the urge to wake up. He wasn’t ready. He just needed a couple more minutes.

“ _Lister!_ ”

He rolled over in bed, turning away from the sound of Rimmer’s voice.

“For smeg’s sake, Lister, it’s time to get up now.”

He didn’t _want_ to wake up. He was perfectly comfortable where he was.

Only… was he?

Still laying on the bed, facing away from Rimmer, Lister did a quick assessment of his current circumstances. No, he wasn’t comfortable. He wasn’t exactly uncomfortable either, though. He was simply… numb? No, not that. But something.

Just to check, he flexed his fingers. He could feel the movement. He tired something else; touching the fingertips of his right hand to the skin of his left arm. It felt normal; exactly as he would have expected. What _wasn’t_ normal, was that he couldn’t feel the bed beneath him.

Definitely more awake now than asleep, Lister adjusted his position so that his hand touched the bed. He was aware of a vague feeling of pressure, an idea that something was there, but from the surface itself, he could detect nothing; no rough, scratchy JMC blankets, no cotton sheets, no… anything.

Something was wrong. Something was very wrong.

“Come on, Lister. I know you’re awake. Get up, so I can get this over with.”

Get _what_ over with? Lister decided to ignore the nagging hologram for a moment longer, while he did his own damage assessment. The last thing he remembered was landing Starbug on an abandoned ship they had noticed on the short range scanners. He remembered the four of them looking around and not finding anything interesting, and then… nothing.

No. Not nothing. Pain. He remembered a sudden pain in his head, an accompanying flash of blinding white light, and then…

And then this. Whatever this was.

Whatever it was that was happening, or had happened, or was about to happen, Lister had a feeling he wasn’t going to like it. He pushed his fingers further into the surface that he was laying on, testing it. With no resistance at all, his hand passed straight through it, as though the mattress had disappeared.

Gripped suddenly by a wave of panic and disorientation and the certainty that he was falling, Lister gasped. His eyes opened of their own accord, and he found himself in his quarters.

“You just _had_ to ignore me, didn’t you?” Rimmer said. “You could have just woken up and let me explain, but no.”

Lister gasped again, trying to calm his breathing. Sitting up in bed now, he cradled the hand that had fallen through the bunk against his chest. “Rimmer, what…”

Before he could finish the question, his brain kicked into gear and began to make connections. Something had hit him on the derelict ship. Hit him, or fallen on him, or… something. Whatever it was, it had done some damage. It didn’t make sense for him to just be waking up in bed the next day.

He looked at his hand, and then he looked at the bed.

No.

It wasn’t possible. It just wasn’t. Except for… he raised a hand to his head and his fingers touched the smooth surface of a letter ‘H’ right in the centre of his brow.

Oh smeg…

Rimmer folded his arms, unfolded them, and then folded them again. “Don’t panic,” he said.

Lister stared at him, incredulous.

“Really, don’t. It’s not what you’re thinking.”

“I’m a hologram.”

Rimmer frowned, then nodded. “Okay yes. In _that_ respect it’s exactly what you’re thinking.”

Lister looked at his hands again, examining them carefully. They were definitely _his_ hands. He recognised them, right down to the well-chewed nails and the hard calluses on the tip of each finger of his left hand from pressing the strings of his guitar. Only, they weren’t his hands, were they? Not really. They were an image, a computer simulation. His real hands, smeg, his real _body_ was laying dead somewhere, and he was… not himself. He was…

“You’re not dead,” Rimmer told him.

“I…” Lister frowned. “What?”

“You’re not dead,” Rimmer repeated. “You didn’t die, you’re still alive.”

Lister reached upward, stretching his arm until his hand passed through the top of the bunk above him and disappeared up to the wrist. Lister stared at it. He had been expecting that, of course he had. Still, nothing could have prepared him for how smegging _weird_ it was to watch his hand pass through a solid object as though it wasn’t there. He shuddered involuntarily. “No? How do you explain that, then?”

A flicker of some unidentifiable emotion crossed Rimmer’s expression, and he looked away. “You survived,” he said. “But you were injured. Your body’s down in the medi-bay, hooked up to machines to keep it alive. Kryten’s reasonably sure you’ll recover. Will you please take your hand out of the ceiling?”

Lister lowered his hand into his lap. “ _Reasonably_ sure I’ll recover?” Somehow, that didn’t sound particularly reassuring.

Rimmer shrugged. “Well, it’s better I got. All I got was a rude awakening in the hologram simulation suite with nobody to explain things to me except for a senile computer. The last thing _I_ remembered was getting the scan to create my holographic likeness, and that was months before the accident, before you even went into stasis.”

Lister frowned. “Wait, so you don’t even remember the accident that killed the crew?”

“Of course I don’t. You saw my death video; it was over in seconds. I hardly had time to pop down to holographic imaging and do a quick scan.”

He supposed not. He’d never really thought about it before, but for some reason he’d always assumed that Rimmer remembered the accident. If his memories ended before Lister went into stasis, that meant he didn’t remember doing the shoddy repair job on the drive plate either.

“That must have been confusing.” Lister said.

“Confusing? Try absolutely bewildering. Try mind-blowingly terrifying. A feeling that I was trying to spare you, by the way, by letting you wake up naturally in bed before I broke the news gently. A plan you completely ruined by sticking your hand through the bunk.”

“All right, Rimmer, calm down,” Lister told him. “So here’s a question.” He dropped down from the bunk onto the floor, and peered into the mirror at the reflection of his own face. His eyes were drawn to the large letter ‘H’ in the middle of his forehead, marking him out as a hologram. “Why do _I_ remember everything? The last time my brain pattern was scanned was before the accident too.“

Rimmer shook his head. “Remember when we downloaded your brain onto a disk so that you and I could swap bodies?”

Unfortunately. He _still_ had the nightmares. “So you used that disk? But then, why isn’t _that_ the last thing I remember?”

“Of course we didn’t use that disk, we downloaded it back into your head at the time.” Rimmer spoke slowly and deliberately, as though speaking to a small, and particularly stupid, child. Or maybe somebody that had recently been hit in the head by something very hard. “We used the same tech. We scanned you again while you were knocked out. I _told_ Kryten it was a mistake to do a procedure like that on somebody that was unconscious and possibly brain damaged, but…”

“Wait. Brain damaged? What are you talking about ‘brain damaged’?”

“Possibly. I said _possibly_ brain damaged. Calm down, Listy. It looks like you’ve come through with your faculties intact. Well, as intact as they ever were…”

All things considered, this was shaping up to be a very bad day. Lister took a deep breath and tried to quell the rising panic inside him. “Okay, fine,” he said. “Good.”

“Of course that’s only your higher functions. Speech, thought, memory. As for the other things, like the ability to walk, or feed yourself, or...I don’t know, live any kind of an independent life, that’s anybody’s guess.”

Lister stared at him. “You _what_?”

“I’m just saying. Just because your mind is intact doesn’t mean your _brain_ is. You could wake up with locked-in syndrome, for all we know.”

Well, _there_ was a horrifying thought. “Great,” he said.

“It’d be just my luck, if that happened,” Rimmer added.

“Just _your_ luck?”

Rimmer sighed. “Well, believe it or not, Lister. Between you, the Cat and Kryten, _you’re_ actually the least worst. It’d be just typical if you were the one that ended up a vegetable and I ended up spending the rest of eternity with those two idiots.”

“Well, thanks a lot,” Lister said, sarcastically.

“I mean it, oddly enough.”

Rimmer was completely missing the sarcasm, and quite frankly, Lister lacked the mental energy to explain it right now. That had been far too many terrifying revelations in the space of a single conversation. All he wanted to do right now was curl up in the corner and cry. He pushed aside the urge; there would be time for that later. “Okay fine. So, start at the beginning, what actually happened to me on that ship?”

Rimmer nodded. “You got whacked over the head by a psychotic simulant,” he said. We knew we had no hope of fighting it off, so we managed to drag you out of there. No idea why it didn’t show up on the scanner, but apparently it didn’t take kindly to a group of strangers landing on its ship and looking around for salvage.”

And so it had attacked them. Or more specifically, it had attacked him. “Was everyone else alright?” Lister asked.

“I was a little shaken up, seeing that happen. There’s a lot of blood with a head wound, you know. And the Cat got some of it on his suit. It stained, so he decided he needed to burn it.”

“And that’s it?”

“He insisted on holding a full funeral service before the cremation. All his other suits attended.”

Lister rolled his eyes. “Figures.”

“The eulogy was rather moving, actually.”

“Sorry I missed it.” Lister realised his eyes had been drawn back to the large letter ‘H’ on his brow. It was metallic silver, like Rimmer’s had used to be, and designed in such a way that it appeared to reflect the light from all angles, making it impossible to overlook. Looking at his face, it was all you could see. “So, if Cat and Kryten are both okay, where are they?”

“They’re around,” Rimmer told him. “Actually, I asked if I could be the only one to be here when you woke up. I wanted to deliver the news myself.”

Of course he did. Rimmer had probably volunteered himself for that job the moment anybody raised the possibility of placing Lister in a hologram body had occurred to them. He had probably spent hours trying to think of the most entertaining way to break the news. He had probably had the skutters note down endless versions of the same speech, trying to squeeze in exactly the right amount of faux sympathy to make it believable while actually gloating at Lister’s misfortune.

Lister was glad he had been able to steal Rimmer’s thunder by figuring it out. He tilted his head forward as though eying him suspiciously over a pair of imaginary spectacles. “Oh, you did, did you?”

Rimmer nodded. “I know what it’s like, Lister. I know it’s not exactly the same for you as for me; I'm dead, you aren’t. But the end result is the same. Inhabiting a body that isn’t real, composed entirely of light. Able to see, but never to touch the world around you. It’s hard, Lister. It’s so much harder than you think it’s going to be.”

Smeg. Rimmer actually sounded sincere.

And he was right, too. The week Lister had spent in Rimmer’s body when they had swapped temporarily had been bad enough. He couldn’t imagine doing it for years, like Rimmer had, with no hope of a reprieve. He just hoped his body healed quickly from the trauma and he could move back in.

He folded his arms and tried not to think about it. “I’ll be fine, Rimmer. Anyway, as soon as my body’s healed, Kryten’ll be able to put me back and everything will go back to normal.

There was a noticeable moment of hesitation before Rimmer nodded. “ _If_ your body…” he began, then shook his head. “Yes. Absolutely.”

“It _will_ heal,” Lister insisted. “I’m resilient like that.” It had better do, anyway. He flexed the fingers of one hand and looked at them intently. They didn’t look intangible. This was too smegging weird.

“Well, in the meantime,” Rimmer said. “If you need anything; advice on how to do something without the ability to touch, coping strategies for dealing with it, or if you just want to talk, I’m available.”

Lister stared. There was no hint of gloating in Rimmer’s voice at all. It appeared to be a genuine offer, and something about that worried Lister more than the whole situation combined.

“Thanks,” he said. “I think.”

Rimmer shrugged awkwardly. “Right. Well.”

Lister folded his arms. “So, shall we go visit me?”

He wondered what hospital visiting etiquette was for a hologram visiting his own comatose body. There didn’t seem to be any point taking grapes.


	2. Chapter 2

There was something indescribably weird about looking down on your own body from above. A disconcerting wave of unreality gripped Lister, and it was all he could do not to reach for the side of the bed to steady himself.

By some miracle, he managed to stay upright as he looked down on himself. Rimmer might have promised him that he wasn’t dead, but standing over his own body as though he had risen out of it and left it behind, that felt difficult to believe. Maybe he _was_ dead, and they just hadn’t realised it yet.

The Lister in the bed looked shrunken, somehow; thinner than he remembered being, and not in a good way. His features appeared gaunt, his skin clammy and pale, as though drained of blood. A bag of fluid hung at the side of the bed, connected by a tube to his arm, through which a liquid dripped constantly.

“Well,” Lister said. He tried to keep his tone as light as he could, but he could hear the tension in his voice. “I’ve definitely looked better.”

“I’m so sorry about this, Mr Lister sir!” Kryten exclaimed.” We tried everything. Absolutely everything!”

Lister turned to look at him. The distress he could see and hear from the mechanoid actually helped, allowing him to focus on something else. Something familiar. “It’s okay, Kryten,” he promised him. “I know you did.”

“In the end, I realised that all we could do was wait,” Kryten continued. “There was no way to speed up the healing process; you just needed to recover in your own time. So we placed you on life support, and made sure you were getting all the nutrients you needed to support your recovery. I’m afraid the rest is up to you.” He hesitated, looking from Lister, to Lister’s body, and back. “Well, up to him,” he added.

Lister nodded. “It just looks like he’s sleeping,” he said.

“It’s a coma,” Kryten said. “You’re breathing on your own, but if you were simply sleeping, you would have woken up by now.”

His chest moving coming up and down. The movement was barely perceptible, but now that Kryten had drawn his attention to it, Lister couldn’t stop himself from watching intently as his body drew air into its lungs and expelled it into the room.

Breathing meant life.

“What about brain damage?” he asked.

“I don’t think you need to worry about that, sir. From what I can tell, there has been no damage to the… to _your_ brain itself. There is, however, a significant amount of swelling. Once that goes down, I see no reason not to expect a full recovery.”

Lister turned to glare at Rimmer for his earlier comments. Rimmer at least had the good sense to look guilty. “I was just warning you,” he said. You can’t be 100% certain of anything when it comes to the brain, Lister.”

“That is true, sir,” Kryten agreed. “However, in this case I’m almost 99.9% sure that there is no long-term damage to the brain.”

Something wasn’t adding up here. Lister’s fingers traced the shape of the letter ‘H’ on his forehead and tried to put his finger on what, exactly, was wrong. “So why bother with all this, Krytes?” he asked. “Why go to all the trouble of downloading my brain and making a hologram if you’re so sure I’m going to make a full recovery? Why not just wait for me to wake up? Couldn’t stand to live without me for a couple of days?”

Kryten glanced sharply at Rimmer. “You didn’t tell him?” he asked.

Rimmer tensed. “I… forgot,” he said.

Lister looked from one to the other. “Tell me what?” he asked.

Kryten folded his arms. “How can you forget something that significant? Really, sir, it’s not exactly a trivial detail.”

“What isn’t?” Lister asked, a little louder this time.

Rimmer folded his arms, immediately on the defensive. “I had a structured plan for the conversation, and I was going to get to it. It’s not my fault Lister decided to go off-script and push his hand through the bunk. It completely threw me off.”

Lister shook his head. “It threw _you_ off? How do you think _I_ felt? Can someone _please_ tell me what the smeg is going on?”

From the other side of the bed, where he had been making himself comfortable in a chair, Cat looked up. “They forgot to tell you you’ve been asleep for six months already,” he said.

Lister spun around to look at Kryten and Rimmer. “What?” he said.

Kryten shifted uncomfortably. “It’s true, I’m afraid,” he said. “And honestly, I’m not sure how much longer it will be. Rather than let you sleep away potentially years of your life, we thought it would be preferable for you to live it, albeit as a hologram, until your body was recovered enough for you to move back in.”

Lister stared at Kryten for a full thirty seconds before turning to look at Cat again, and finally, back at Rimmer. “Six months?”

“I’m afraid so.”

Lister suddenly felt like he needed to sit down. Unfortunately, the one chair in the room was occupied by the Cat, and after the bunk incident, Lister wasn’t sure how safe he felt on anything other than the floor. He had seen Rimmer sitting -- or appearing to sit -- on all kinds of surfaces, and not once had he fallen through. Yet, Lister thought about his hand passing through the bunk below him, and was struck by a wave of uncertainty.

Even the floor underneath his feet didn’t feel safe. If he slipped through it, he wondered whether he could keep falling, out of the ship, and on through space indefinitely.

The thought did not appeal.

He folded his arms tightly, squeezing as hard as he could. “Six smegging months,” he said to himself.

“Hey, it’s not so bad,” Cat told him. “I’d _love_ to take a nap that long. Can you imagine? And also, you see that little tube? The one feeding you?”

Lister looked. “Yeah.”

“Well, you know what it’s _not_ feeding you? That curry stuff you’re always eating.”

Lister frowned. “Of course it’s not. So?”

“So?” Cat frowned at him in consternation. “That stuff stinks up the whole ship! Do you know how many times I’ve put on one of my favourite suits only to find that it smells of chicken vindaloo?”

Lister shook his head.

“Too many, that’s how many! And do you know how many times it’s happened in the past six months?”

“None?”

Cat stared at him in apparent amazement. “Yeah, that’s right! None! How’d you guess?”

Lister ignored him and turned back to Kryten. “So you’ve no idea how much longer it’ll take for me to get better?”

The mechanoid shook his head. “I’m afraid not, sir.”

“How about a guess?”

Rimmer stepped forward. “Lister, don’t be ridiculous. What would be the point in guessing?”

“An educated guess, I mean,” Lister protested. “I’m not talking about a stab in the dark here. He must have _some_ idea.”

“Educated? Him?” Rimmer scoffed. He glanced scornfully at the mechanoid.

Lister ignored him and turned his attention back to Kryten. “Come on, Kryten. I mean, I’m assuming we’re not talking a couple more days or weeks, or you wouldn't have gone to all this bother, right? But am I looking at another six months? A year?” he hesitated, reluctant to go on. “ _Two_ years?”

Kryten appeared to be wringing his hands. “I’m sorry sir, but I honestly don’t know. Mr. Rimmer’s right, I’m not an expert when it comes to this kind of thing. I have no real medical training.”

Cat grinned. “Oh yeah, that’s right. Remember the crew on the ship where we found him? He hadn’t even noticed they’d died.”

“I’m much better than that now, sirs!” Kryten protested.

It was true, he was. Of course, it wasn’t difficult to be better than ‘unable to tell a skeleton from a living person’.

Lister sighed. “Yeah, I know you are, Kryten.”

He raised a hand to pat the mechanoid on the back, before remembering that he couldn’t and allowing his hand to drop back to his side.

“Alright,” he said. “So, six months. What did I miss in all that time?”

A series of glances went around the room.

“I finally got around to alphabetising my photographs of twentieth century telegraph poles,” Rimmer told him. “Only, I decided I didn’t like it, so I’ve gone back to chronological order.”


	3. Chapter 3

Without the others in the room with him, it felt oddly _loud_ in the medi-bay. The machinery hummed in a variety of different frequencies, while one monitor bleeped in time with his heart beat.

Lister looked down on his body from the side of the bed. “I don’t know how you can sleep through this row,” he said to himself.

“Oh, I’m sure it isn’t difficult sir,” Kryten said. Lister looked up to see the mechanoid walking through the door into the room. “After all, you sleep through your own snoring every night. The soundscape of this room is practically melodic by comparison.”

Lister glared at the mechanoid, who hung back by the door.

“I’m sorry, sir. I don’t wish to disturb your visiting time, but you’ve been here for hours, and there are several things I need to do.”

Lister shook his head, “No, Kryten, it’s fine, come on in.”

The machines continued to hum and bleep, while the drip at the side of the bed continued to feed nutrients into his body. It was hard to be sure, never having seen himself from this angle before, but Lister was certain that the body in the bed looked smaller and weaker than he had before. Kryten checked several displays and noted down information from each of them.

Lister watched as he worked, trying to decipher the meanings behind some of the readouts. “How’s he doing?” he asked.

“Who, sir?” Kryten asked. He finished making his notes, then fluffed the sleeping Lister’s pillows.

Lister stared at him in disbelief. “Who do you think?”

“Um…” Kryten said. “Mr Rimmer? He seems marginally less unhappy since you returned, sir, but as it’s only been a few hours, it’s quite difficult to be certain.”

Rimmer? Lister shook his head. “Kryten, I’m not asking about Rimmer. I’m asking about…” he indicated his unconscious body with a wave of one hand. “Hang on, why would _Rimmer_ be happier now I'm back? Rimmer hates me.”

“Oh, I’m sure he doesn’t hate you, sir. A strong dislike, definitely, sometimes maybe even bordering on a mild loathing, but hate? Certainly not.” 

Lister scowled.

“And as for why; well, I believe he enjoys having you to bicker with. He’s been rather down while you’ve been unwell. The prospect of bringing you back appears to have perked him up somewhat.”

He bet it did, Rimmer was probably eager to watch him have a terrible time, and Lister wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction. “I wasn’t talking about Rimmer,” Lister said. “How’s _he_ doing?” He pointed at his own body.

Kryten glanced at Lister, then at Lister’s body, and then back to Lister again. “Ah. Much the same as you were two hours ago, sir,” he said.

“No improvement then?” Lister hadn’t really expected one, still, it would be nice to hear that things were moving in the right direction.

“Nothing noticeable, no. But don’t be disheartened by that, sir. Any improvement is going to be measured in months, not hours.”

Lister nodded glumly. He had known that, of course. Kryten had told him as much just a few short hours ago. He wasn’t stupid, he knew it had been a lot of effort to place his mind into a hologram. It wasn’t something they would have bothered with if they expected him to wake up quickly.

“How will you know when he’s better, anyway?” Lister asked. “I mean, I’m no expert, obviously, but I’ve seen my fair share of films where someone ends up in a coma, and it always seems like you only know they’re better when they wake up. I’m not in there, so I’m not going to wake up. So, how will you know?”

“I won’t,” Kryten told him. ‘The medi-comp will. It’s been monitoring your condition for six months, and providing hourly updates. I’m fairly confident that it will be able to tell when you’re getting better. When it says the word, we’ll just pop you back in there and see what happens.”

Kryten being ‘fairly confident’ didn’t exactly fill _Lister_ with confidence.

“And of course, if we _do_ put you back too early, it would be no trouble at all to just flush you out again.”

“Flush me out. Great.” Lister felt sick. Could holograms vomit? He wasn’t sure, and he didn’t particularly want to find out. “This whole thing isn’t going to hurt my chances of recovery is it, Kryten?” he asked. “Me being out here wondering around I mean, instead of in there concentrating on getting better?”

Kryten shook his head. “I don’t believe so sir, no. After all, you were doing very little while you were in there, other than enjoying the world’s longest nap. I believe that the power of positive thinking is a myth. If humans had the ability to think themselves well, your species would have been, for all intents and purposes, immortal.”

“I doubt that, Kryten. It’s not some magic pill that makes everything better, it’s more like…” he reached for a comparison. “It’s more like homeopathy. Most people know it’s a load of crap, but when it’s the only option left, they’re willing to give it a go.”

“Well, sir,” Kryten told him. “I see no reason why you can’t think positively from out here.”

Lister supposed not. 

He sat himself down on a chair at the side of the bed -- he wasn’t really sitting on it, of course. The holographic image of his body hovered a fraction of a fraction of a millimetre above the chair, giving the very realistic illusion that he was sitting on the chair -- and pondered. “Kryten, who’s idea was it to make me a hologram? Was it Rimmer’s?”

Kryten frowned. “No, I don’t believe so… Let me think…” as he thought, the mechanoid busied himself topping up the water in the vase of artificial flowers on the table next to the bed. “It was more of a group idea, I believe. One of those times where one idea leads to another. But I do believe the one who kick-started the whole discussion was actually Mr Cat.”

“Cat? Seriously?”

“Well, not deliberately. He actually said something along the lines of ‘Hey, if he dies, can I have his bed, or will we bring him back like goalpost head?’ and the idea just blossomed from there. We already had the relevant technology, from when you and Mr Rimmer switched bodies. It was simply a case of flushing out your mind, and instead of inserting another personality, leaving your body empty, firing up your hologram and uploading your mind.”

Lister rubbed a hand down his face. He felt violated. The last time Kryten had performed a similar procedure on him without his permission, Rimmer had done a runner with his body, and for one brief, terrifying moment, when Starbug had made a crash landing, he had been certain that the hologram had killed him.

“Mr Rimmer was against it actually, initially. He claimed it was because he was enjoying having your sleeping quarters to himself, however I was never convinced by that reason.”

“Kryten,” Lister said. “Didn’t I tell you never to use that bodyswap tech on me ever again?”

Kryten nodded. “You did,” he confirmed. “But in the intervening time, I’ve managed to break from my programming to the extent that I’m now able to disobey your orders. You know that, sir. After all, you were the one that helped me to do it. Besides, this wasn’t exactly the same procedure, which made completely disregarding your wishes much easier.”

Great. He’d suffered nightmares for months after that whole incident. Even now, over a year later, he sometimes woke up in a cold sweat from a dream of finding his bruised and battered body dead in the crashed Starbug, leaving him trapped forever in Rimmer’s holographic body. A shiver ran through him, and he folded his arms tightly against the imagined chill.

All this was just a little bit too close to his nightmares for comfort.

“Sir, did I do wrong? Would you rather I’d left you unconscious inside an injured body? I can easily put you back, if that’s what you prefer.”

Lister shook his head. “No.”

“Then you’re happy about the decision we made?”

He shook his head again. “No.”

“Then…” Kryten looked very confused. “Then…”

Lister sighed. “Relax, Kryten. ‘Happy’ might be pushing it a bit far, is all. But yeah, given a choice between this, and laying there comatose for the next couple of months, I guess I’ll take this.”

“I’m so glad, sir,” Kryten told him.

“But once my body’s all healed up and I’m back inside it, no matter how good you get at disregarding orders, consider this a standing order to never, and I mean _never_ , use that tech again without my express permission. Got it? If you think there’s even a chance you might be tempted, to chloroform me and switch me with Rimmer, we’re going to flush all the mind swap stuff out of an airlock.”

Kryten nodded. “I would never.”

But he had, and Lister wasn’t sure he was ever going to be completely over it. He nodded, satisfied for now. 

“Now, if you’ll excuse me, sir, your body requires a bit of routine maintenance.”

Lister frowned. “What kind of maintenance? Anything I can do to help?”

The mechanoid shook his head. “Not really, sir. You’re a little too intangible right now to be of any use. No offence.”

Lister nodded. “Right.” That was going to take a bit of getting used to.

“Besides, I was just about to give you -- that is to say your body -- a sponge bath.”

He _really_ didn’t want to stick around for that. The whole situation was weird enough, without watching Kryten wiping down his comatose body with tepid water. “I’ll go… see what everyone else is up to,” he said, and made a hasty retreat.


	4. Chapter 4

“No, that piece. That one right there!” Lister jabbed at a jigsaw piece so hard that the tip of his finger went through it, and half an inch into the table beneath. He pulled it back quickly, and rubbed the finger compulsively on the sleeve of his jacket. He knew that it didn’t really feel weird. He knew that the tingling sensation when his body passed through something was a physical impossibility and happening all in his head, but that didn’t make it feel any less real. He rubbed the finger until the feeling subsided.

The skutter let go of the incorrect jigsaw piece that it had been holding in its three-fingered hand, and allowed it to drop back to the table. The piece landed upside down, showing the blank cardboard of the wrong side. Instinctively, Lister moved to turn it back over, but remembered that he couldn’t, and instead scowled at the mechanical menace.

The scutter turned to him, questioningly.

“It’s fine,” he said. “Sort it in a minute. For now, just get the right piece. I think it goes there.” He pointed again at the completed jigsaw inside the box, which was placed in the centre of the table. This time, he avoided putting his finger through it. He indicated part of the jigsaw that was the same approximate shade as the piece now in the skutter’s fingers.

The skutter watched, then lowered the jigsaw piece into the box. It didn’t fit. 

“Try turning it around,” Lister said. He scratched the back of his head as he tried to visualise a clock face. “Uh… Clockwise, ninety degrees.”

The skutter hesitated, and then turned the piece the wrong way.

“The other clockwise,” Lister said. “Keep going. Keep goi… wait. There. Now just… you know, jiggle it around a bit until it goes in. Yes!”

Rimmer, typically, chose that exact moment to walk into the room.

“Lister, whatever it is you’re trying to do in here,” he said, “I _really_ don’t want to know.”

Lister smirked. “I’m doing a jigsaw,” he said.

“Oh.” Rimmer strode over, interested now. “A twenty four piece jigsaw, Lister. Well, I imagine that’s stretching your intellect a bit, isn’t it?”

“Smeg off.”

Rimmer stayed where he was. He looked at the half completed image. “Still, you’ve managed to do all this? With that idiot of a skutter helping? Not bad, actually. How long has it taken you?”

Lister shook his head. “Most of it was already done in the box,” he admitted. “It’s been an hour, and we’ve got one piece in.”

The hologram had an expression on his face that was somewhere between sympathy and amusement. “Yep, that sounds more like it,” he said.

“I mean, most of that time was just trying to get the pieces out of the box and the right way up on the table,” Lister added, not sure whether that was better or worse.

Rimmer smirked. “Oh, Lister,” he said. “If I was a vindictive man, I’d be having a field day right about now. All those times you told me to stop complaining about being dead. The times you _insisted_ that the skutters were an effective replacement for a functional pair of hands.”

“ _If_ you were a vindictive man?” Lister rolled his eyes. He turned his attention back to the jigsaw, and pointed at the piece that had landed the wrong way up. He addressed the skutter again. “Turn that one over again, will you? I think I know where it goes.”

Rimmer nodded. “Yes, _if_. Luckily for you, I’m not.” He sat down on the bed behind him. “The trick is to get two skutters to help at the same time. They’re ridiculously competitive. Tell them both the other one’s doing a much better job, and hey presto! Two actually useful service droids instead of one brain-dead moron.”

Lister turned to look at him. “Does that work?”

“Oh yes. Every time. And the best part is, you don’t even have to be sneaky about it. They’re so stupid you can just blatantly lie to both of them in front of the other and they don’t click. This one isn’t going to remember hearing me say this, either. That’s one of the few advantages to leaving machinery to rot in deep space for three million years.”

Lister looked back at the jigsaw puzzle. The skutter was awkwardly sliding the jigsaw piece to the edge of the table to get a better grip on it. It slid it too far, and the piece fell onto the floor. “Thanks, man,” Lister said. “I’ll try that.”

“Another little tip?” Rimmer added. “Don't try to do jigsaw puzzles. They’re ridiculously fiddly, and even when they’re trying to outdo each other, skutters are clumsy, ham-fisted little buggers with less dexterity than a drunken rhinoceros. You’ll just end up getting frustrated with them and wanting to smash the puzzle up, and you can’t. Smashing things is strictly off-limits for the time being.”

“Rimmer, what do you take me for? I’m not the kind of guy that smashes stuff when things don’t go his way.”

Rimmer nodded. “Maybe not, but a couple of weeks as a hologram and you may well want to be. Do yourself a favour, take up jogging or something.”

“I’ve never really been the keep-fit sort,” Lister told him. “And anyway, what’s the point? It’s not like it’s my real body I’d be exercising. I’d just be wasting time with no benefit.”

“One benefit is that it gives you something to do,” Rimmer told him. “Another is that it’s surprisingly good at working out those frustrations. So you can’t punch the walls, but there’s nothing to stop you pummelling the corridors with your feet.”

“I don’t _have_ any frustrations,” Lister lied. He wasn’t really sure why he was lying, he was reasonably sure that Rimmer could see right through it. “I’m _fine_. I can still do everything I used to do, it’s just a case of figuring out how.”

“Suit yourself.” Rimmer shrugged and turned away, obviously done with the conversation.

Lister turned back to his jigsaw, took one glance at the waiting skutter, and shook his head. There would be plenty of time to finish it, preferably when he was safely back in his own body and could touch things again, but failing that, he’d settle for when Rimmer wasn’t there, watching him.

He glanced around the room for something else to do. His gaze landed on his guitar, propped up against the wall where he usually kept it. He sighed. “I don’t suppose you’ve got any useful tips on what to do with that, do you?” he asked. Not really hopeful, but it wouldn’t hurt to check.

“Airlock three,” Rimmer told him.

“What?”

“That’s the closest airlock on this deck. Oh, sorry. I thought you were looking for tips on the best way to dispose of it.”

Lister rolled his eyes. “I’ll see you later, Rimmer.” He got to his feet and headed out the door.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ♥ Comments are loved ♥


	5. Chapter 5

Lister didn’t visit the refectory often anymore. It was quiet in there. The kind of quiet that was oppressive, that pushed heavily into him from all sides, driving home exactly how alone he was in the universe.

Right now, however, solitude was exactly what he was looking for. 

It felt strange, being there. Once, the room had been alive with people; people talking, arguing, laughing, living their lives. He missed them, but right now, he was glad that they weren’t there. Lister sighed to himself, then he leaned back in his chair and put his feet up on the table in front of him. 

They fell right through, and landed back on the floor.

“Smeg!” He glared at the table as though it were somehow _its_ fault. The table didn’t seem to care. Lister folded his arms, and slouched sulkily.

He wanted to thump something, and it was made so much worse by the fact that he couldn’t. And _that_ was made so much worse by the fact that Rimmer had been right. He had said that Lister would want to smash something, and here he was daydreaming about beating up an innocent table.

It wasn’t that he wanted to break things, it was more about _feeling_ something. Anything. Being incapable of touch was frustrating, and not just because he couldn’t do things for himself. The loss  
left a deep need inside him, something that he couldn’t quite put into words, and something that he was going to have to learn to ignore. 

He took a deep breath and tried to push it out of his mind. It had only been a week. Months of this stretched out ahead of him, and if he was going to get through it with his sanity intact, he was going to need to find ways to cope with it.

Ways that didn’t involve sitting on his own wishing that he could punch the furniture.

Cat slunk into the room carrying a pile of three meals from the vending machine. Without noticing Lister, he sat down at a table on the other side of the room and put his pile of plates down in front of him. From somewhere about his person, he pulled out a large bib. He tied it around his neck to protect his suit, then removed the lid from the first meal.

Lister watched for a moment, caught somewhere between annoyed that his alone time had been interrupted, and glad of the distraction. It wasn't like being alone was helping. He watched as a cloud of steam rose from the plate, and Car smiled to himself and inhaled deeply.

Lister got up, crossed to the other side of the room, and sat down directly opposite Cat. “Hey Cat,” he said.

Cat’s head jerked up quickly as his hands moved instinctively to guard his fish. He relaxed when he saw that it was Lister. “Oh, it’s just you,” he said. He dropped his guard and picked up his knife and fork. “What are you doing lurking down here?”

“I wasn’t lurking,” Lister told him. “I was just sitting.”

“Sitting in a lurky way,” Cat told him. He turned his attention back to his meal, and began to carefully scrape away the white sauce that covered his fish, shoving it to the side of the plate, where it instead coated the vegetables that came as a side dish. “So, why?”

Lister shrugged. “I wanted to get away from Rimmer,” he said.

Cat began to carefully tease flakes of fish away from the bone with his fork. He nodded sagely, “Yeah, makes sense,” he said. “What’s he done now? Tried to make you look at his collection of telegraph pole photos?”

Lister shook his head.

“Insulted your favourite suit?”

“No,” Lister shook his head again. “I don’t really have a favourite suit.” He didn’t have a suit at all, actually.

“Put on that horrible hammond organ music he thinks is good?”

Lister shook his head for a third time. Actually, now that he thought about it, Rimmer hadn’t actually _done_ anything. He hadn’t even insulted him. It was something else that Lister was trying to avoid. Something much less familiar, and much more unsettling.

“He was being nice,” he said.

“Nice?!” Cat shook his head as he continued to tuck into his fish. “You sure we’re talking about the same guy?”

Lister shrugged. “Yeah. It’s really weird. It’s like he was genuinely trying to help. Well, until he told me to throw my guitar out of an airlock, that is. And I’m just waiting for him to turn around and start gloating, you know? I almost wish he would. At least I know what to do with that.”

Cat finished his first plate, the fish all gone, the sauce and vegetables left rejected at the side. “You know I hate to agree with him, but he’s right about that guitar,” he said. He opened the lid to the second meal and began the process over again. 

Lister scowled. “There’s nothing wrong with my guitar! Anyway, it’s not about that. It’s like he’s trying to cheer me up. Like he wants me to admit that I _need_ cheering up.”

“And _do_ you?” Cat asked.

Lister shrugged. Maybe, a bit. But what he _really_ wanted right now was a good mope. The kind where he stayed in bed all day, watched old movies, and wallowed in self pity over the fact that he would never have what those old black and white characters took for granted, because the human race was gone, and he was three million years from Earth. The kind of epic mope where he would eat crap and drink too much, and maybe, when he decided it was time to start feeling better, strum his way through a couple of songs.

Only, he couldn’t do that now. He couldn’t eat crap, and he couldn’t play the guitar, and although he _could_ drink, it wasn’t real, and it wasn’t the same, and no matter how many times he reminded himself that it wouldn’t be forever, it didn’t matter. Without an end date to look forward to; a day when he knew that he would be able to slip back into his body and resume normal life, being a hologram was proving to be a lot more difficult than he had anticipated.

He hated that Rimmer was right.

“Buddy?” Cat said. Lister blinked, and realised that Cat had already finished his second fish and made a start on his third.

“No,” he said. “I don’t need cheering up. I’m fine, Cat. Never better.” He wanted to be alone again. He got up to leave.

“Hey, man, you don’t have to go,” Cat told him. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you. You’re a hologram, right, like alphabet head?”

Lister frowned “No, not exactly like…” he shrugged. He didn’t have the energy. “Yeah, I guess so. Temporarily.”

“So all that stuff you’re wearing,” Cat indicated Lister’s general appearance with a distasteful look and a circular wave of his hand. “All that stuff that you so loosely call clothing, it’s not real, right? It doesn’t exist.”

“It does exist,” Lister told him. “It’s just sitting in a drawer somewhere waiting until I can wear it again.”

“Yeah,” Cat said, “but that, right there, that you’re wearing, it’s not real, right? It’s just a picture made out of light. That’s how come I can pass my hand right through it.” He moved his hand toward Lister, who instinctively jumped back out of reach to prevent it passing through his stomach.

Lister glared at him. “Hey, not cool, man. Yeah, so?”

“So answer me this. You could be wearing anything you wanted right now, all you need to do is ask Holly to dress you. So of all the clothes in the universe, why _that_ outfit?”

Lister looked down at his outfit, black trousers with his favourite leather jacket over a replica of a London Jets t-shirt he’d had since he was twenty one. It was a little tighter than it used to be, but it still fit. “What’s wrong with it? It’s what I usually wear.”

Cat shook his head and turned his attention back to his meal. “I think you just answered your own question there, bud.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'd really appreciate a comment if you're enjoying this. Let me know what you think. Is it worth continuing?


	6. Chapter 6

Lister was halfway through a movie when Kryten entered his quarters with an empty laundry basket tucked under one arm. His other hand clutched a full-looking teapot with steam rising slowly fro the spout. The mechanoid stopped completely still in the doorway and stared at Lister.

Lister, laying in his bunk, head propped up on one hand, smiled at him. “Alright, Kryten?” 

Kryten didn’t reply. He remained where he was, staring at Lister as though transfixed.

Lister’s smile turned into a confused frown. He glanced behind him, checking there was nothing there that might have captured the mechanoid’s interest. Finding just the usual wall, he turned back. “Uh, Kryten?”

His hand moved self consciously to the large letter ‘H’ on his forehead. It was the only thing in the whole situation that was different, and it had taken him a while to get used to seeing it on Rimmer, so it stood to reason that the others would find it strange on him. 

“Kryten, what’s going on? Is something wrong?”

Finally, Kryten blinked. “No sir. Stare mode cancel. I’m sorry, it’s just so good to have you back, Mr Lister. For the past six months, I’ve been trapped on the ship alone, with only Mr Rimmer and Mr Cat for company.”

Lister shrugged unsympathetically. “Yeah, been there,” he said.

Kryten walked busily across the room, placed the teapot on the table and the laundry basket on the floor next to it. “So, sir, I trust you’re well? How are you adjusting to your hologramatic status?

Lister gave the question serious consideration as he took a swig of his hologramatic lager. The drink was nothing like lager, not really. It wasn’t even like having a drink. There was no feeling of quenching his thirst, because he had no thirst to quench. The drink didn’t feel cold, but it didn’t feel warm either. It was somehow completely without temperature. There was no fizz either, and he was reasonably certain that the taste he was detecting was constructed entirely from his own memory and expectation of the flavour, rather than from the drink itself.

“Sir?” Kryten asked

Lister shrugged. “Yeah, I guess so. I mean, it’s…” he shrugged again, struggling to put it into words. “It’s not been very long,” he said. I’ve done nearly this long before, when me and Rimmer swapped bodies.”

Of course that had been different. There had been a time limit on that arrangement. They had agreed to swap for two weeks, although in fact it had lasted much less time. This was completely open ended; he had no idea how long it might last, or when it might be over.

Kryten nodded. “I imagine this is a little different to that, sir.”

“Well, yeah. For a start I’ve got _you_ looking after my body instead of Rimmer, so that’s definitely better.”

“But sir, you’re in a coma.”

Lister nodded. “Even so. The whole thing’s not great though. I think it’d be easier to put up with if I knew how long it was going to be for.”

“Of course.” Kryten opened one of Lister’s clothes drawers as he spoke. “And I wish I could give you that information sir. I really do.” 

He knew Kryten didn’t know. He took another sip of pointless lager, just for something to occupy his hands. Vaguely, he wondered whether Holly would be capable of simulating a pack of cigarettes for him.

“I’d forgotten what a pain in the arse it is to not be able to do anything for yourself. You want to pick something up? Nope, gotta ask the skutters to do it for you. Want to push that button? Too bad, ask the Cat. And this stuff?” He raised the can of holographic lager in the air. “It’s like vaguely beer flavoured nothingness. I don’t even know why I keep drinking it.”

He took one final swig, then tossed the half-empty can across the room in the direction of the bin. It spun through the air for a second, then disappeared just before it hit its target.

“I see,” said Kryten. “Sir, I don’t know whether you’re aware of this, but historically, new holograms were given a minimum six weeks of weekly therapy sessions by the Space Corps, as well as company mandated rehabilitation.”

Lister frowned. “Why?”

“Well, sir, it was found that holograms were prone to depression and bouts of existential crisis. Of course, much of that was linked to the knowledge that they -- the person that they were -- was dead. That is not the case for you, of course. Still, I would expect there to be a certain adjustment period. A significant portion of the rehabilitation involved learning ways of doing things without the ability to touch, as well as coping with the emotional impact of that.”

Now that Lister thought about it, that all made perfect sense. “I don’t suppose you have any of those therapy sessions built into your programming, do you?” he asked.

Kryten shook his head. “Me, sir? No, I’m afraid not. You might find some relevant literature in the ship’s databanks, but, as loathe as I am to say it, most likely the best person for you to speak to would be Mr. Rimmer.”

“I don’t think so,” Lister said, immediately.

“No. Honestly, even _thinking_ that suggestion felt ridiculous,” Kryten admitted. “But unfortunately, he is the closest thing we have to an expert on the subject.”

“He’s also a complete smeg head,” Lister countered. Rimmer would probably love it if he went to him for help. After all, Lister hadn’t exactly gone out of his way to make things easy for Rimmer when he had first been switched on.

“Granted, sir,” Kryten agreed. “He did, however, visit you almost every day when you were in the medi-bay. He does appear to care. Although honestly I doubt he would make an effective therapist.”

No kidding. Literally anybody that had ever been born would make a better therapist. With the possible exception of Cat. 

“Although, frankly, given the circumstances, it’s a miracle that Mr. Rimmer is still sane.”

Lister scoffed. “Kryten, Rimmer was never sane to begin with.” He had been teetering on the edge long before he had even died. Although, maybe that only proved Kryten’s point. “So how’d he do it then? How’d he manage to not go any crazier?”

Kryten appeared to think about the question as he reached into Lister’s drawer, pulled out a handful of neatly folded t-shirts, screwed them up, and dumped them in the laundry basket.

“I suppose the only way to be certain would be to ask him. I do have my own theories though. Perhaps Mr Rimmer’s personality, deficient though it is, is actually suited to being a hologram. I mean, he is stand-offish to the extreme and cowardly to the point where not being able to be touched, and therefore not be hurt, may actually be considered beneficial. Also, while admittedly I didn’t know him in life, I don’t imagine him to be the kind to be touchy-feely with his friends.”

“What friends?” Lister asked, then sighed. “I didn’t know any of this stuff.”

“No reason you should, sir.”

But there was. He had been bunking with a hologram for five years, and what had he done? Nothing useful, that was for sure. He had repeatedly told Rimmer to stop whinging about being dead; actually point blank told him that he wouldn’t touch things for him, because he’d seen what Rimmer liked to touch; and occasionally threatened to switch him off in favour of someone better. 

Honestly, if Rimmer _did_ want to gloat about Lister’s current situation, he would probably be justified.

From another cupboard, Kryten removed a packet of biscuits, took one out, crushed it between his hands and dropped the pile of crumbs into the laundry basket with the clothes.

Lister watched him, bemused. The mechanoid picked up the teapot he had brought into the room and tilted it, ready to pour the contents into the basket. “Kryten,” Lister asked. “What the smeg are you doing?”

Kryten looked from the basket of screwed up, crumb-covered clothes, to the teapot in his hand, and finally back to Lister. He appeared to consider the question carefully. “Laundry,” he said.

Lister frowned. “I’m no expert or anything, but even I know _that’s_ not how you do laundry. Not unless we’ve landed in the backwards world again.”

“I...I...I…” Kryten opened and closed his mouth in a compulsive way that made Lister think he was about to have a serious malfunction.

“Kryten…”

“You just don’t understand what it’s been like, sir. You were unconscious, you didn’t need me to do your washing because you simply weren’t generating the same amount of mess that you usually did. Add to that, I only had half the number of dishes to wash, and absolutely no detritus to pick up after you, and I was quite literally going out of my head with boredom!”

Lister frowned. “So why didn’t you just find something else to do?”

“I didn’t want to do anything else! It was laundry day and I had nothing to launder, so I went into your quarters one day, emptied out your drawer and… well, it was such a relief to get back a bit of normality. Since then, I’ve been doing two loads a week.”

“Right,” Lister shook his head in bafflement. “But couldn’t you just do the Cat’s laundry instead?”

“He wouldn’t let me. He said he didn’t trust me with his suits.”

“Look, why don’t you just put those back, and watch the end of the film with me?” Lister suggested. “Or I can get Holly to rewind it to the start, I don’t mind watching it again.”

Kryten shook his head, still brandishing the teapot above the basket. “I can’t, sir. I need to get these clothes dirty so that I can get them nice and clean for you.”

Lister sighed. “Whatever makes you happy, I guess,” he said, but as he spoke he noticed a yellow t-shirt among the biscuit crumb-covered pile. His eyes widened in panic and he leapt down from the bunk to grab the basket out of Kryten’s hands.

He remembered at the last moment that he couldn’t. Instead, he waved a hand at the yellow t-shirt in the middle of the pile. “Hang on a minute, what’s that?”

“A pile of laundry, sir. We just discussed it, remember? Perhaps I need to do some additional tests to ensure you didn’t sustain brain damage in the accident.”

“No, what’s _that_ ,” Lister tried to clarify. He pointed at the yellow t-shirt again, knowing that he only owned two t-shirts of that particular colour and hoping that this one wasn’t the one he thought it was.

Kryten put down the teapot to free up his hand, then pulled the shirt out from the centre of the pile and held it up for Lister to see. “A t-shirt, sir.”

Lister looked at it, and his heart sank. “Smeg,” he said.

You could barely see the stain anymore. He moved his head a little closer and squinted. He could just about make out the mark where the blob of vindaloo had dripped from an overloaded piece of naan three million years ago, but it had faded almost to the point of disappearing.

“Kryten, how many times have you washed this t-shirt?” he asked.

The mechanoid looked at it, doing a quick calculation. “Between the beginning of your coma and now? Approximately twenty times.”

“You’ve nearly got the stain out,” Lister told him.

Kryten looked at it. “Which one, sir?”

“That one,” Lister pointed at a barely-there stain on the left side of the t-shirt. “There was a stain there from where I dropped curry on it. It was the first time Kochanski spoke to me, and I was so surprised I dropped curry and it made a stain in the shape of a heart. That was the first time I knew that we were meant to be together.” And now it was gone.

Kryten looked at the t-shirt again, a guilty look appearing on his face. “Oh sir, I’m sorry! I had no idea that stain had sentimental value. I didn’t rotate the wash, I just kept taking the clothing from the top of your drawer. If I’d dug down a little deeper, maybe this wouldn’t have happened! Although, frankly, I was a little afraid of what I might find in there.”

Lister sighed. “Forget it. Just, don’t wash that one anymore, okay? Leave it alone, it’s clean enough.”

The mechanoid put down the basket of ‘dirty’ washing, shook off the crumbs and carefully folded the yellow t-shirt and put it back in the drawer where he had found it, then picked up the remaining t-shirts and left quietly.

Lister watched him go, and sighed to himself, then turned to address the middle of the room. “Holly, give me another beer, will you?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments are loved.


	7. Chapter 7

Lister’s guitar stood resting against the wall, in the same place it had been yesterday, and the day before. The same place he had left it the last time he had played it, months ago, when he could still touch it.

Sitting on his bunk with his legs dangling over the side, Lister moved his hands as though he was playing, humming a tune to himself as he imagined the feel of the guitar in his hands; the weight of it, the feel of the smooth, painted wood, the pressure of the strings on his fingertips as he pressed the frets and strummed to coax music from the instrument.

He stopped. It was no good. Imagining it would just never be the same.

Lister sighed deeply, pulled his legs back up onto the bed, and lay down. He closed his eyes and tried not to think. Thinking at a time like this would be a bad idea. The best thing he could do when he felt himself sinking into despair was pick up his guitar and let himself get lost in the music.

He had never been prone to depression before he had been marooned in deep space. He was fully aware that he’d had his issues, but that had never been one of them. Since Holly had brought him out of stasis, however, he had found himself sinking into low moods with alarming regularity, even before he had been whacked over the head and woken up as a hologram.

He supposed it made sense. After all, he was the last human being alive, he was cast adrift in deep space, with very little hope of ever seeing Earth again, and he hadn’t touched a woman in three million years. Honestly, he supposed it was a miracle that he wasn’t a blubbering wreck rocking back and forth in the corner.

Most of the time, he could ignore the feeling; push it into the back of his mind and act like it wasn’t there. He could drown it out by making himself smile, finding the joy in what little he _did_ have, and forcing himself not to think about what he had lost. If he pretended hard enough most of the time, it would go away.

But not always, and once he began to sink, he would often sink _hard_ , and it would take time and effort to drag himself back up. And that was what he felt beginning to happen now.

It had been brewing for some time in the back of his mind, and right now, he just didn’t have the mental energy to fight it off. He couldn’t retreat into his usual coping strategies. He had always used his guitar to stave off the worst of the loneliness, his guitar, and a good curry, and now he couldn’t even touch either.

“Lister, falling back into old habits, I see,” Rimmer announced as he strode purposefully into the living quarters they shared. “Honestly, if I’d known that you were going to spend all your time lying around in bed, I’d have suggested we leave you comatose.”

Lister cracked open an eye and glared at Rimmer through it. “Very funny.”

Rimmer shook his head. “It wasn’t a joke,” he said.

Lister rolled over onto his back and stared up at the ceiling. “Leave me alone, Rimmer. I’m not in the mood.”

Rimmer frowned at him as though he was some disgusting piece of gum he had found stuck to the bottom of his shoe. “Not in the mood for what, exactly?”

“This conversation, for a start,” Lister said. He wasn’t in the mood for anything, he wasn't in the mood to have to deal with Rimmer, he wasn’t in the mood to talk, and he _definitely_ wasn’t in the mood to have to pretend like he was okay. Not now, when he was feeling less okay than he had in a long time.

Rimmer nodded. He looked himself over in the mirror, brushed down imaginary dust from his clothing, then turned back to Lister. “You need to get up,” he said.

Lister continued to stare at the ceiling. “I’m tired,” he said.

“No, you’re not. Well, you shouldn’t be, anyway. You only woke up a couple of hours ago.”

“No I didn’t,” Lister argued. He frowned, and turned to address a question out into the centre of the room. “Hey, Holly, what time is it?”

Holly’s face appeared on the viewscreen. “About 4.15pm,” she said. “Why?”

Lister turned back to Rimmer triumphantly. “See. I woke up _three_ hours ago.”

“Oh, well done,” Rimmer congratulated him in a voice dripping with sarcasm. “And what have you done with your day so far? Achieved a lot, I imagine. Have you even got out of bed yet?”

“Yes!” Lister told him. Truthfully, as it happened. “I mean, only for a bit. I popped down to the medical unit to check on my body.”

Rimmer nodded. “How’s it doing?”

“Same.” Lister turned his head to look at Rimmer as he spoke to him. “Kryten says he's going to keep me informed, but I guess there’s nothing to tell, because so far he’s barely said a word about it.”

“No news is good news,” Rimmer said.

Lister shrugged. He wasn’t so sure about that, but he supposed that at least it wasn’t _bad_ news.

“I don’t understand why you keep going down there.” Rimmer told him. “Surely it can’t be fun, seeing yourself hooked up to all those machines.”

“It’s not.”

“And it’s not like it’s helping anything. It isn’t like visiting a sick relative so they think you care. There’s nobody in there to score points with.”

Lister stared, disbelieving. “That’s the only reason you’d visit someone in the hospital then, is it? Point scoring? So they ‘think you care’? You genuinely wouldn’t give a damn if someone you cared about was sick in hospital?”

Rimmer shrugged. “It would depend on the person,” he said.

“So did you never go visit _me_ then, before you hologrammed me? You never once swung by to check up on me?”

Rimmer folded his arms and looked away. “Once or twice. I didn’t make a habit of it.”

“No? Because Kryten told me you were there every day.”

Rimmer shrugged dismissively and suddenly appeared very interested in the wall at the other side of the room. “Yes, exactly. Once or twice a day. That’s what I meant.”

“Because you didn’t want to make a habit of it.”

The hologram scowled, then folded his arms. “Even comatose, Lister, you’re a better conversationalist than the Cat. Anyway, forget that, we were talking about you, not me.”

Technically, no. Lister had been trying to have a lie down on his bed. _Rimmer_ was the one trying to talk.

“You’ve got to get up, Lister. Stop moping around and get on with your life. Otherwise what was the point in us giving you this hologram body, if all you’re going to do is lie in bed?”

Lister eyed him suspiciously. “Did Kryten put you up to this?” he asked.

“Kryten? No. Why?”

Lister shook his head. “No reason. So, go on then, what do you suggest I do? I mean, my options are a bit limited right now, if you didn’t notice.” 

Rimmer gave him a look. “Yes, thank you. I’m well aware of the limitations of being a hologram Lister. I’ve been dealing with them for a good few years now. Maybe it’s time you stopped moping around and listened to me. You might even find that I have some vague idea what I’m talking about.”

Lister sighed.

“There’s loads you could be doing,” Rimmer assured him.

“Like?”

“Like? I don’t know. What do you want to do?”

Lister shook his head. He _wanted_ to be left in peace. He had been perfectly fine moping around in bed. “Leave me alone, Rimmer,” he said. “I’m okay, honestly. I don’t need your help.”

Rimmer shrugged, and turned to leave. For one, brief, moment, he thought the hologram was going to do as he was asked. Facing the door, Rimmer stopped, and then turned back. “No,” he said. “I’ve had enough of this. Get up.”

“Rimmer…”

“Lister, you know the ship’s computer can take control of a hologram’s body, right? Holly did it to me, when he decided to play that ridiculous practical joke and pretended to be Queeg. It’s not very nice, and if you don’t want to learn that first hand, I suggest you get out of bed.”

Lister sat up and stared at him in horror. “You wouldn’t,” he said.

Rimmer stared back at him wordlessly. His expression said ‘try me’.”

Lister felt his mouth go dry as he imagined a total loss of control. A familiar feeling of claustrophobia began to grip him at the mere thought of it, but that would be so much worse than being trapped in a small space. To be trapped within his own body, unable to move except at the will of another person. He felt himself begin to break out in a cold sweat, and his heart, or the simulation of his heart, pounded in his chest.

“Don’t.” He slid down from his bunk. “Please don’t, Rimmer. Don’t you dare.”

“I wouldn’t.” Rimmer told him. He was staring at him in horror. “I… really I wouldn’t. What do you take me for? It was a joke.”

A joke. A _joke_? Lister took a deep breath and sat down so heavily on Rimmer’s bunk that for a moment he thought he was going to fall through it. He ran a hand over his face, then wiped it on his trousers. It felt like there wasn’t enough oxygen in the room.

“Look, I’m sorry,” Rimmer told him. “I didn’t mean to make you… whatever it is that’s happening. What _is_ happening, by the way?”

Lister leaned forward and rested his head in his hands, he sucked in a slow deep breath and exhaled through pursed lips as he tried to chase away the rising panic. “Claustrophobic,” he said.

“Oh. Well I wasn’t going to make you lock yourself in a box or anything.”

Lister forced himself to look up and glared at Rimmer, who genuinely looked worried about what was happening. Lister took another slow, deep breath. “You’re a total smeg head, Rimmer. You know that, right?”

Rimmer sat down on the bed next to him. “It’s been pointed out to me,” he said. “On occasion.”

Lister nodded.

“In my defence though, I expected you to just threaten me back, or… I don’t know, maybe call my bluff or something.”

Lister sucked in and blew out another breath. “Rimmer, if you ever so much as _think_ a threat like that again…”

Rimmer nodded. “I won’t,” he promised. “Got you out of bed though.”

“Yeah.” Lister sat up straight and rubbed a hand over his face again. He could still feel himself shaking, but he trusted that Rimmer wasn’t really going to follow through on the threat. He turned to look at Rimmer. “Any particular reason for that? Or have you just decided you don’t like people to be laying down?”

“I wanted to try to cheer you up,” Rimmer told him. “I smegged that one up, didn’t I?”

Lister couldn’t help it, he laughed at that. “Great job,” he said.

Without thinking, he touched Rimmer. A quick hand on his shoulder as he moved to get up, and he froze.

With his hand still on Rimmer’s shoulder, he stared at it in fascination. “Rimmer…” he began, but broke off.

Rimmer too, was sitting completely still, staring at Lister’s hand. His eyes were wide, and his expression impossible to read.

Lister squeezed, just slightly, pressing his fingers into Rimmer’s shoulder. He could feel the flesh and the bone beneath. It felt so real. Warm; human. The unexpectedness of it took his breath away.

Rimmer raised his other hand slowly. Hesitantly, he touched the back of Lister's hand. Through the fingerless leather gloves he was wearing, the touch felt feather-light, moving slowly across the back of his hand, tracing the shape of it. Lister watched, wanting him to press harder, but not wanting to break the spell of the moment by speaking.

And then, it was over. As quickly as if a switch had been pressed, Rimmer snatched back his hand, got to his feet, and bolted from the room.

“Rimmer, wait a minute!”

Lister was too late, Rimmer was already gone and by the time Lister had reached the door, he had disappeared around a corner.

“Smeg.”

He went back into the room and sat back down on the bed. He looked at his hand. He could feel the ghost of the unexpected touch. He touched his own hand, but it wasn’t the same. It didn’t speak to that need for contact inside of him; a need that until that moment, he hadn’t even recognised.

He sighed. He didn’t get it, Rimmer had seemed to like it at first. Until he hadn’t. Lister flexed his fingers and shook his hand as though he could shake off the memory of the touch, but it was impossible.

Finally, he got to his feet. “Holly, do you know where Rimmer’s gone?” he asked.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments are loved and treasured.


	8. Chapter 8

Their old quarters looked at once both familiar and strange. After their move up to the officer’s deck, their old room felt small by comparison. Cramped, and old. It made sense; of course the officer’s quarters would get refurbished more often than those of the lowest two technicians on the ship. Still, Rimmer had almost managed to forget how how much luxury they had been living in since the move. It was strange, though, to see their old room so bare and empty, stripped of all the old posters, photographs and mementos that had made it home. 

He sat down on his old bunk. Instinctively, his hand went to his own shoulder, touching himself in the same place that Lister had touched him, remembering the feeling, so unfamiliar now, of another person’s touch. It had been so long that he had almost forgotten what it was like.

And now… Now he remembered again, and it was too late to do anything about it.

He took a deep breath, then rubbed hard at his shoulder as though he could erase the touch. It wasn’t that he hadn’t liked it; it had been _wonderful_ to be touched again, even if it _was_ Lister, he just couldn’t do it. He had spent so long trying to come to terms with the fact that he would never experience physical contact again, and then Lister blunders in, and...

“Hey,” Lister’s voice cut through his thoughts. Rimmer looked up to see the other man standing in the doorway. “It’s been years since I’ve been in here. I’d almost forgotten what these quarters were like.” Rimmer looked up at him. He hadn’t expected Lister to find him here.

“Holly told me where you were,” Lister explained, reading his expression.

Of course. Holly had betrayed him. Although, was it really a betrayal if he hadn’t actually asked Holly to keep his whereabouts a secret?

Yes, he decided. Definitely a betrayal.

“So, what was that about?” 

Rimmer shook his head. He didn’t want to do this, that was why he had left.

Lister marched uninvited into their former sleeping quarters and reached for the back of a chair to turn it around. His hand passed through it. For a moment, he glared at the chair as though it were somehow at fault, then sat down. Unfortunately for Lister, the chair’s previous occupant — probably also Lister — had left it facing completely the wrong direction for a comfortable conversation with somebody sitting on the bunk. Lister turned his head to look at Rimmer, almost behind him, then gave up and instead turned his body around to sit with his legs through the back of the chair.

Rimmer stared at him in horror. It just looked so unnatural. A hologram just didn’t _do_ things like that. Or at least, _Rimmer_ didn’t do things like that. He didn’t do anything, if he could help it, that broke the illusion that he had a body. Lister didn’t appear to care. Or if he did, he was better at hiding it than Rimmer.

“So,” Lister asked again, “What was that about?”

“What was what about?” Rimmer asked, feigning ignorance.

Lister rolled his eyes. “Just then, when you ran off,” he clarified. “What was _that_ about? Jealous of my little freak-out? Wanted one of your own?”

Rimmer shook his head. There was still a chance he could get out of this. If he really tried, he could be able to confuse and deflect his way out of the uncomfortable situation. Maybe. Maybe. It all depended on how alert Lister was feeling this afternoon. He shook his head. “I didn’t run off,” he said.

Lister stared at him in disbelief. “Rimmer, you literally took off at a sprint. By the time I got to the door you were nowhere to be seen, and it’s not exactly a short corridor. If that’s not running away, I don’t know what is.”

Rimmer shook his head. “Granted, I _was_ running,” he said. “I’ll give you that much. It’s the ‘running _off_ ’ part of your statement that I take issue with. It implies that I was running away from something when in actual fact, I was running _to_ something.”

“Oh yeah?”

Rimmer nodded.

“Right. I get it.” Lister sank into silence for a moment. He flicked one of his dreads from behind his neck, put the end of it into his mouth and chewed. “So,” he said around a mouthful of hair. “What was it?”

Rimmer frowned. “What was what?”

“The thing you were running to.”

“Oh.” Keeping his head still in the vain hope that Lister wouldn’t notice him looking, Rimmer moved his eyes from left to right, scanning the room, looking for something to say. Their former quarters were completely empty of almost anything that wasn’t fixed to the floor, and even if there had been anything he had needed, he wouldn’t have been able to get it for himself anway. That left him with only one option. Bullshitting. “Ah… just something of vital importance,” he said. “Something that you couldn’t possibly understand.”

Lister nodded sagely. “Right, yeah. Makes sense.”

“It does?” Rimmer asked, surprised. He hadn’t really expected that to work. “I mean, yes. Of course it does.”

“So,” Lister continued. “The fact that we touched each other about a half second before you ran _to_ your vitally important thing, that had absolutely nothing to do with it, then?”

Rimmer shook his head. “No,” he said. “Not at all. Touched? Are you sure? I didn’t even notice, to be honest.” He realised that his hand had moved, instinctively back to his shoulder, where Lister’s hand had touched him. 

Lister was staring at him in disbelief. Clearly, he wasn’t buying it. He shook his head. “You know the ridiculous thing, Rimmer?” he said. “ _Nothing_ happened. It was just a casual touch. It’s the kind of thing that happens every day. _Several_ times a day, maybe even several times an _hour_ to normal people. It’s not like we kissed or something, is it? It’s not like we woke up in bed together the next morning. I touched you on the shoulder, and that was it.”

Rimmer folded his arms and didn’t say anything.

“Do you know how many of my mates I’ve snogged after a couple of pints?” Lister continued. “Never had a reaction even close to that.”

“Er…” Rimmer wasn’t sure exactly what to say to that. He decided to ignore it. “What exactly do you mean by ‘normal people’?” he asked. “Are you implying there’s something _ab_ normal about being a hologram?”

“No, smeghead, I’m implying there’s something abnormal about _you_.”

Rimmer glared at him, and Lister grinned triumphantly. “Very funny,” Rimmer told him. He didn’t think it had been a joke, but then he didn’t really think it had been funny either.

Lister grinned harder. “Seriously though, what was that about, Rimmer? I thought you’d _like_ being touched. I mean, I didn’t do it on purpose, but that’s not the reaction I expected.”

Rimmer sighed. There was going to be no avoiding this conversation. He supposed the only way out was through it. He ran his fingers nervously through his hair, and deliberately didn’t look at Lister as he spoke. “Honestly,” he said, “It was a little overwhelming. I haven’t touched another person in three million years. Well, not unless you count the time we played Better Than Life, or when I met my female counterpart in the parallel universe, and one of those wasn’t real. The other, I’m still actively trying to forget.”

“It was good though, wasn’t it?” Lister said.

Rimmer looked at him, and found a strange look on Lister’s face. One that he didn’t recognise.

“Touching, I mean. Reaching out for something and not having your hand pass through it.”

It really had been. It had been so long. Years without any kind of touch.

“So, what do you think?” Lister got to his feet and stepped forward out of the chair. He pulled the glove from one hand and shoved it into a pocket, then held out the hand to him, reaching across the space between them as though offering a handshake.

Rimmer ached to reach out too; to clasp his hand into Listers, to feel the warmth of his skin, and that calming feeling that real human contact would give him. He hesitated. He didn’t trust him not to pull his hand away. To bring Rimmer to his weakest moment, expose as much of his trauma as he could, and then just walk away. It was what Rimmer might have done.

“Come on, Rimmer,” Lister said. “I need this, so I _know_ you do too.”

Rimmer frowned. “ _You_ do?”

“Well, yeah. I can’t touch anything either.”

That was ridiculous. How could Lister even begin to compare… “Lister, you’ve been a hologram for all of five weeks. Try five _years_ , then talk to be about being touch starved.”

Lister’s hand dropped to his side. “Being what?”

“It’s a thing where… Well, work it out for yourself,” Rimmer told him. “I’m sure your single remaining brain cell can probably manage that.”

“Yeah, well I might _have_ to do five years,” Lister said. He sighed. “Come on, Rimmer. You said yourself, when I first woke up and you told me what was going on, you said it’s going to be harder than I thought. Well, congratulations, you were right. So if you want to gloat about it, go right ahead. And yeah, you ‘re right, it’s only been a few weeks for me. I can’t even imagine what it’s been like for…” he tailed off, and took a deep breath. “Look, I know if it means this much to me, you _have_ to need it too. Don’t you want some real human contact?”

“I think you’re being overly generous with the word ‘human’ there, Listy.”

Lister gave him a look. For a moment, Rimmer thought he was going to back off, then Lister held out his hand again, invitingly.

Rimmer considered the offer, then shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

Lister’s hand dropped to his side again. “Smeg! Why not?”

“Because…” Rimmer began, then stopped. “Why are you only wanting to do this now, anyway? You’ve had five weeks, what’s made you suddenly so desperate to touch me now?”

Lister shrugged. “I guess I didn’t think of it before,” he said. “I mean, I had other things on my mind.”

“So you forgot,” Rimmer said. “Over a month as a hologram and you never once thought ‘wait a minute, holograms can touch one another’.”

“You never said anything either.”

Rimmer sighed. “What should I have said? ‘Scuse me, Lister. I know we loathe one another, but how about a bit of casual hand-holding?’ Yes, I imagine that would have been well received.”

Lister shook his head. “I don’t ‘loathe’ you, Rimmer. And yeah, it might have been a bit weird, but I’d have done it.”

“Well, no thank you.” Rimmer said.

“I just don’t get it. I’d have thought you’d have jumped at this chance, even if it is me.”

He just couldn’t do it, and he didn’t know how to make Lister understand. “Okay, so, hear me out,” he tried. “You remember what happened when we swapped bodies?”

Lister visibly shuddered at the memory. He folded his arms in a defensive way and took a half-step backward, embedding the back of his leg into the chair again. Rimmer wondered whether he even noticed how he had reacted. “I could hardly forget,” he said. “I still have nightmares about that crash. And the arm thing. What’s your point?”

Rimmer stood slowly. With slow, measured steps, he walked across the room toward the door, stopped, turned, and walked back again. “The point, Lister, is I wasn’t myself.”

“No,” Lister agreed, “You were me.”

“No, I don’t mean that. I mean the way I behaved. When we made that agreement I had every intention of sticking to it. I fully intended to eat healthily, get you into shape, and return your body fighting fit, and what happened?”

What had happened was that he’d spent a week gorging himself on the most unhealthy foods in Red Dwarf’s storage, things that, in some cases, he didn’t even like. It had been a mad rush to cram as much food, as many flavours and textures and temperatures as he could, into his mouth. He’d made Lister put on so much weight that he’d ended up on a diet for six whole months just to get back down to the weight he’d been before they had swapped.

And then, when Lister had insisted on taking his body back a week early, Rimmer had had Kryten chloroform him, stolen it again, then gone on a joyride in Starbug with a chest full of cream buns.

It hadn’t exactly been his proudest moment.

“It overwhelmed me,” he said. “Being able to touch again. To taste. I thought that years as a hologram would have taught me a little self-restraint. I thought I could just be grateful for the ability to eat a nutritious, healthy meal. I thought I would have had the willpower to resist easing fifty cream buns in a single sitting, but I didn’t.”

“Yeah,” Lister said. “And now we have no cream buns left. You lost the rest of them in the crash.”

Rimmer shrugged. “It turns out impulse control isn’t my strong suit.”

Lister shook his head. “No kidding. But so what? I mean, yeah, you were a complete smeghead, and I’ve still not completely forgiven you, but I _get_ it now. Some of it, anyway. This isn’t the same thing.”

But it was. Or at least, it was similar. He was going to have to spell it out for him. “I stole your body because I didn’t want to give up the ability to touch. If I let myself give in to the urge for physical contact now, it might be the same. I won’t want to lose it again. And when you’re healed, I will lose it. I won’t have any choice.”

“Rimmer, that’s smegging stupid, and you know it.” Lister told him. “It’s like... Okay, think about it this way; do you know how many samosas we’ve got in storage in Red Dwarf?”

Rimmer frowned in confusion at the sudden change of topic. “No, of course not. Why on Io would I know that?”

“None,” Lister told him. “And do you know _why_ we’ve got none left?”

“Probably because you ate them all, you greedy goit.”

Lister grinned, holding his hands up in mock surrender. “I did. And when we got down to the last two, I thought about saving them, you know? I thought, maybe I’ll just leave them for a bit. I don’t want to run out. I mean, they’re the last samosas in the universe, aren’t they? But I didn’t. I had a really good curry, and I had them on the side, and I enjoyed every bite. Even knowing that I was never going to taste samosas ever again. In fact, that might even have made them taste better.”

Rimmer felt his frown deepen. “So what?”

“So, you should enjoy things, Rimmer. Don’t focus on how long it’ll last or what it’ll be like when it’s gone. Just enjoy it while it’s there.”

That was easy for Lister to say. He had nothing to lose. When his body healed, he could go back to it and carry on as he always had. It would be Rimmer who was left behind.

Lister held out his hand a third time, and Rimmer could tell that if he turned him down again, Lister wouldn’t ask again. He wanted to accept. He felt his fingers twitch of their own accord, as though begging for permission to reach out and grab hold of something solid. 

Rimmer sighed. He had a feeling he was going to regret this. He raised his arm and slowly, carefully, he allowed their hands to touch.

Lister didn’t move. He stood passively, letting Rimmer take the lead. Rimmer allowed his fingertips to trace the shape of Lister’s knuckles, before taking the hand in both of his, and turning it over to do the same on the palm.

“That tickles,” Lister told him.

“Sorry.”

He shook his head. “No, it’s fine. It’s good.”

He pressed a little harder then, squeezing Lister’s fingers slightly, feeling the bone beneath the skin, marvelling at how solid an illusion could feel. He brushed a finger over the ends of his fingers, feeling the calluses from years of terrible but persistent guitar playing.

He explored further, feeling the texture of the sleeve of Lister’s leather jacket, and the cotton of the shirt he was wearing beneath it. He realised that he had closed his eyes, lost in the sheer joy of being able to touch. He didn’t even mind that it was _Lister_ of all people than he was touching. The only thing that mattered was that it was contact. Real contact.

A thought occurred. “Lister,” he asked. “Just how many of your friends _have_ you kissed when you were drunk?”

Lister frowned thoughtfully. “Not really sure,” he admitted. “A few. And I wasn’t always drunk, actually. Don’t worry though, Rimmer. I’m not interested in you that way.”

Rimmer felt himself flinch, but didn’t pull his hand away. He wasn’t sure whether he was supposed to be relieved or disappointed at that. As it was, he found himself somewhere in between. 

“Good,” he said. “Likewise.”

“Okay then,” Lister said. “I guess we both know where we stand.”

Rimmer nodded, not entirely sure where that was.

“So don’t get the wrong idea,” Lister said, “But honestly, I think you need this.”

His fingers closed around Rimmer’s, gripping his hand tightly, and he tugged, pulling him closer so unexpectedly that Rimmer almost tripped. Before he could protest the rough treatment, Lister wrapped his arms around him and squeezed tightly.

Rimmer felt himself stiffen in surprise. It felt… strange. Awkward. Unnatural. It didn’t feel right to have another person so close to him, so close that he could feel the beating of the other man’s heart, and the warmth of him through his clothing.

Because it felt like the correct response, he placed his own hands around Lister, and held on, trying to match Lister as closely as he could, not too tight, not too loose, hands in approximately the same place. He didn’t want to do it wrong.

He barely remembered the last time he had been hugged; really hugged. He supposed his mother might have, but he had no memory of it. He did have a vague, murky memory of a quick embrace from the school nurse after she had applied a plaster to his grazed knee and dried his tears for him. Even Yvonne McGruder, after their brief tryst, had barely stuck around afterwards for a quick cuddle under the covers.

He inhaled through his nose, but Lister smelled of nothing. The holographic simulation wasn’t that sophisticated. He supposed that was probably for the best.

As the hug went on, it slowly began to feel less strange and uncomfortable. He felt himself begin to relax into it and enjoy the gentle pressure of Lister’s arms around his. Eventually it began to feel not just ‘not bad’ but actively good, as though finally, after a lifetime of accumulation, the tension he carried within him was finally draining away. When, after some indeterminate amount of time, Lister released his grip and stepped backward, it felt like a loss.

“You okay?” Lister asked him.

Rimmer nodded. He didn’t trust himself to speak.

“Sure?”

He nodded again. 

“Good. Come on then, let's get out of here.” Without warning, Lister slung an arm around Rimmer, and half-guided him out of their old quarters and out into the corridor.

Rimmer, still too surprised and emotional from the shock of the past few minutes, simply allowed himself to be led home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to norwegianpornfaerie on tumblr for the beta read on this chapter!


	9. Chapter 9

This was a stupid idea. Lister hadn’t even wanted to do the jigsaw in the first place. Not really. It had just been something to fill a bit of time. When he had found it too frustrating, he had given up. Now, he was sitting on Rimmer’s bunk, watching with increasing frustration as Rimmer now gave it a go.

“That one,” Rimmer said, pointing at one of the pieces scattered on the table. He moved his pointing finger to a gap at the edge of the partially completed jigsaw. “Put it there.”

There were two skutters at the desk, one on either side of Rimmer. The skutter on his left reached down with its claw-like hand, and tried to pick up the jigsaw piece. It slipped from its clumsy fingers back to the table.

Lister folded his arms and sighed. “Forget it, Rimmer,” he said. “It’s just a stupid jigsaw. It doesn’t matter.”

Ignoring him, RImmer addressed the skutter. “No, you dim-witted excuse for a robot. They had more sophisticated machinery than you in the 21st century. Maybe even the 20th. Watch me, and try to copy what I do.” Rimmer reached out and placed his finger above the jigsaw piece. He slid his hand towards himself, leaving the piece where it was, and mimed picking it up as it teetered on the edge of the table.

The skutter tipped its head to the side like a dog observing its master, then tried to copy. The jigsaw piece slid across the table, off the edge, and landed on the floor.

Rimmer gritted his teeth in barely concealed frustration. He pointed to the other skutter. “Now you,” he said. He pointed to another jigsaw piece. “This one. Just like he did, only don’t drop the smegging thing on the floor. I know you won’t, because you’re nowhere near as stupid. In fact, you might be the best skutter we have.”

The second skutter moved itself rapidly from left to right like a dog wagging its tail. It slid the jigsaw piece to the edge of the table, clutched it between two of its three fingers and held it aloft triumphantly.

RImmer turned to look at Lister, and Lister nodded. He had to admit, that was better than he’d managed to get them to do, and faster too. “So, how about getting them to put it down in the right place?” he said.

“Ah,” said Rimmer, “well, that’s a _tad_ more complicated, but here we go.” He turned back to the skutter. “Right,” he said, he pointed to the part of the jigsaw where the piece belonged. “Put it there, try to make the picture match up with the parts around it.”

The skutter hesitated. It moved its arm so that the jigsaw piece hovered just over the jigsaw, and then let go. It fell to the table, bounced, and landed upside down.

Rimmer pushed the palm of his hand into his face, then turned to look at Lister. “See what I mean?” He turned back to the first skutter. “Now you,” he said. “This other skutter’s useless, I can already tell that you’re _so_ much better.”

Lister sighed. “Honestly Rimmer, give up. If it takes this long for every piece…”

“It doesn’t,” Rimmer told him. “Or, it won’t, anyway. They are capable of learning, eventually. Once they know how to do it, they’ll do it on command.” He paused, then shrugged. “Well, for a while. Eventually they’ll forget and you need to do it again, but with a bit of persistence you’ll get a good couple of weeks out of them.”

Lister got to his feet, crossed the short distance between the two of them, and clapped Rimmer on the shoulder. Rimmer flinched in surprise, still not used to physical contact, then turned to look at him.

“Thanks, Rimmer, really. But don’t worry about it. I get the idea, so I can try it sometime if I get _really_ desperate for something to do, but it’s just a kids' jigsaw puzzle, don’t waste your time.”

Rimmer frowned. “Really?”

“Really. I don’t even like jigsaws that much. It’s just something to do that’s not too much effort, and when it takes this much work…”

He was interrupted by Holly appearing on the viewscreen. “Alright?” she said.

Lister turned to look at her. “Hey, Holly. What’s up?”

Holly frowned. “Er…” She hesitated, trying to remember what she needed to say. “Oh yeah, Kryten wants to see you down in the medibay. Says he’s got news.”

Lister’s eyes widened. He hadn’t expected this so soon. A spark of hope ignited in his chest and he turned to look at Rimmer. “Think I’m getting better?” he asked.

Rimmer didn’t answer. Lister spun around and raced out of the door.

* * *

The medical unit was louder than normal. The bleeping of the heart rate monitor was at least twice its normal speed, while the display monitors were updating information every few seconds. The body on the bed looked exactly the same as it always had, despite the hive of activity around it.

“What’s up, Kryten?” Lister said as he entered the room. “Am I better?”

The mechanoid was wringing his hands in a very upset-looking way. Lister came to a dead stop, and was almost bowled over by Rimmer running full-pelt into the back of him. He stumbled, but managed to right himself.

“No, sir,” Kryten said. “You’re… he’s…”

Oh smeg. Lister swallowed and glanced behind him at Rimmer, trying to gauge his reaction.

Rimmer looked tense, his mouth pressed into a thin line. “Spit it out,” Rimmer said to Kryten. “He’s _what_ exactly?”

Kryten stuttered for another couple of seconds before he managed to engage his vocabulary circuits again. “You’ve taken a turn for the worse,” he said. “You had a seizure. It’s finished now, as you can no doubt see. Still, I thought it pertinent to inform you.”

Lister stared blankly at the mechanoid, trying to force himself to process the words that he was hearing. The bleeping of the heart rate monitor was slowing now, and the machines around him were changing their displays less often. “What do you mean I had a seizure?” he asked.

“Well, sir,” Kryten told him, “in basic terms, I mean that you suffered convulsions; you had a fit. You…”

“Yes, thank you Doctor Bogbot,” Rimmer interrupted. He stepped forward, placing himself directly between Lister and Kryten and folded his arms. “Somehow, I don’t think he was looking for a list of synonyms.”

“Oh. No. Of course…” Kryten floundered a little, then fell into silence.

Lister tried to rephrase his question, but for some reason, his mouth was refusing to work properly. He opened it and tried to speak, but the sound that came out was more like a squeak than actual words.

Rimmer spun around at the sound of the squeak, grabbed Lister by the arm and pulled him toward the nearest chair. “You, sit down,” he told him. He applied downward pressure to Lister’s shoulder until he gave in and collapsed into the chair. “You,” he said, rounding back onto Kryten, “Give a sensible answer this time, please.”

“I’m sorry, sir.” Kryten said, addressing Lister rather than Rimmer, “I assumed you were unfamiliar with the term, so I sought to clarify.”

Lister shook his head. Now he was seated, he felt like he could think again. Sort of. “I know what a seizure is, Kryten. What I want to know is why? And will it happen again?”

“And what does it mean for his recovery?” Rimmer added.

Kryten looked at them both. “I’m not sure,” he said. “On all counts. The medicomp is running diagnostics on you, and at this point all I can do is wait for the results. I’m sure it’ll be fine. Absolutely fine. Nothing to worry about at all.” He began tapping the medicomp nervously, increasingly quickly.

Lister leaned forward and rested his head in his hands. He nodded. “Good, okay, so how long will it take to get the results?”

“Just another few minutes, sir.” Kryten tapped the medicomp again, so fast now that his hand was a blur, the sound of the nervous tapping only added to the noise level of the room. “Just try to stay calm,” he said, in a very not-calm tone, “nothing to panic about.”

Lister took a deep breath. A few minutes. He could cope with that. Although, he could probably cope better if Kryten would stop his furious tapping. “It’s definitely going to be okay though, right?” he said. “I mean, I had a friend at primary school who used to have fits, and it never did him any real harm. A couple of times a year he’d just collapse in the middle of P.E. and start flopping around like a fish out of water. Scared the smeg out of me the first few times, til I figured out what was going on.”

“That he had epilepsy, you mean?” Rimmer said.

Lister shook his head. “No. Well, yeah, he did, but the meds took care of that. Turned out he just didn’t like playing cricket, so whenever he saw the teacher go in the cupboard where they kept the bats and the wickets, down he’d go. Then he’d get up, say he felt a bit woozy and go hang out in the nurse’s office for the rest of the lesson. Nobody ever questioned it, because why would they?”

“Well,” Rimmer said, “that’s fairly despicable behaviour. Imaging exploiting a disability like epilepsy just to get out of a P.E. lesson.”

Lister shook his head. Rimmer was probably just jealous because he hadn’t been able to do the same thing. “He got his comeuppance in the end though,” he said. “Got a job at a bank, last I heard he was on the management track.”

Rimmer frowned. “So?”

“So? So he probably ended up a bank manager. Poor bastard.”

“Sir, the results are coming through now,” Kryten told him.

Lister looked up.

“Oh,” said Kryten.

“Oh what? Is that a good ‘oh’ or a bad ‘oh’?” It was a bad ‘oh’, he was sure of it...

Kryten read the information again. “It’s good. It’s… good-ish, anyway.”

Lister glanced at Rimmer again, trying to decide how to interpret that. Rimmer shook his head, equally baffled. “Kryten, ‘good-ish’ is not a diagnosis. What is going on?”

“It’s... inconsistent,” Kryten clarified. “I think it was probably just a blip; one of those things, but the medicomp needs to run more tests to be sure. In the meantime, why don’t you go and relax? I’ll tell you as soon as I have any news. Which will be good, I’m sure.”

One of those things? Lister shook his head. “Relax? After this? How the smeg am I supposed to relax?”

Kryten shrugged. “I don’t know, sir. I noticed a jigsaw puzzle in your quarters the other day. Maybe you could work on that?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to norwegianpornfaerie on tumblr for the beta, and the advice on writing Kryten.


	10. Chapter 10

“Look at this place, Lister,” Rimmer said appreciatively, as he jogged into their quarters in sportswear, and glanced at the hologramatic watch strapped to his wrists as though he was checking his time. He tapped it a few times, then nodded in apparent satisfaction.

Somehow, Lister doubted he had actually run very far. From the top bunk where he had been laying, Lister glanced around the room. Nothing seemed particularly unusual. He frowned. “What?”

“It’s never been tidier,” Rimmer told him. “Holly, a clean uniform please.”

The jogging bottoms and t-shirt disappeared to reveal Rimmer’s usual uniform. He glanced in the mirror to check his appearance, then sat down on the bottom bunk.

“I mean, look at it,” he continued, addressing Lister again. “Your dirty laundry basket is completely empty, your clean clothes put away neatly, not hanging out of the tops of your drawers like they’re trying to escape. The ashtrays are empty and clean, there are no half-empty lager cans laying around the place, no remnants of last night’s dinner. I almost feel like I live with an adult.”

Lister rolled his eyes. “Yeah, well don’t get used to it. It’s only like this because I can’t do any of those things. Soon as I get my body back, I’m sure I’ll be back to driving you crazy in no time.”

From the bunk below him, Rimmer made a sound that Lister couldn’t quite identify, somewhere between a laugh and a sigh.

Lister frowned again. “What?”

“Nothing,” Rimmer told him.

It hadn’t been nothing. Lister rolled over onto his side and peered over the side of the bunk to look at Rimmer. “What?”

Rimmer shook his head. “You won’t appreciate it,” he said.

“Try me.”

Rimmer sighed. He got to his feet, walked a few paces, turned around, and then walked back again. “Fine. You sound like me,” he said. “Like I used to. Obsessed with getting my body back, convinced that it was going to happen…”

“It _is_ going to happen,” Lister told him. “My body’s still alive in the medical unit, yours got turned into radioactive dust three million years ago. Not the same thing.” It had _better_ happen, anyway. The only thing that was keeping him from going crazy was the thought that there would, eventually, be a resolution to the situation, that he could be downloaded back into his waiting body and resume life as normal.

Rimmer nodded. “I hope you’re right,” he said.

I _am_ right,” Lister told him. “The results of the more detailed scan came back, and whatever caused it, it’s not done any more damage at least.”

“ _Whatever caused it_?” asked Rimmer. “So you don’t know, then?”

Lister shook his head. That was the worrying thing, apparently it just sometimes happened, and when it did, sometimes it happened again. “It’s totally normal,” he said, “Nothing to worry about. In fact, Kryten reckons I’m doing better than the medicomp predicted.”

“That’s the way it goes sometimes though, Lister,” Rimmer told him. He paced the room again. “One brief push toward life, like they put all their strength into getting better, and for a moment it works, until it doesn’t. One day the doctor’s telling you things are improving, and you’re convinced Great Uncle Ernest is going to pull through, the next you’re making an appointment at the funeral home and trying to decide what music to play as he disappears behind the big curtain.”

Lister lay back down. “Great, thanks a lot.”

Rimmer nodded. “Just trying to prepare you for the possibility,” he said. “I wouldn’t want you to be disappointed if you wake up dead tomorrow.”

Lister folded his arms. He couldn’t work Rimmer out sometimes. One minute he almost seemed like he was trying to be nice, the next, he came out with something like this. Lister ignored him.

“It’s not all bad though,” Rimmer added. “Like I said, the place has never been tidier.”

One of two things was happening here. Either Rimmer was trying to upset him -- possible but somehow it didn’t feel likely, or Rimmer was genuinely trying to help, but in such a _Rimmer_ way that it felt as though he was trying to upset him.

“And you know, holograms can theoretically continue forever, they don't die. Not to mention being intangible makes you de facto indestructible.”

“Oh yeah?” Lister asked. “So that’s why you’re the first one to go charging headfirst into danger, is it?”

“Of course I don’t endanger myself unnecessarily,” Rimmer told him. “I’m the highest ranking crew member on this ship. You’d be lost without me.”

Lister rolled his eyes. “Yeah, right. Absolutely.”

“But you, Lister. Think about it. No more getting whacked on the head by psychotic droids, no more worrying about what might happen to you when we encounter the next horrible thing. In fact, maybe you should just opt to stay as you are regardless of what happens to your body.”

“I don’t think so,” Lister told him. “Why are you bringing this up, anyway?”

Rimmer shrugged. “No reason. Just making conversation. I thought you might be bored, so I decided to come up with something to occupy your mind.”

“You thought I might want to occupy my mind with the thought of dying and being a hologram for the rest of eternity?”

Rimmer shrugged again. “Everybody dies, Lister. Wouldn’t it be better that it happened now, while you’re prepared for it? And while you’re already in a hologram body; while you’re actually _yourself_ rather than the most recent backup of your personality and memories?”

Lister thought about it. “No,” he said. “Smeg off.”

And you’d get to attend your own funeral,” Rimmer added. That’s always been a dream of mine, you know. Right from being a boy. I always thought that if I died -- or rather if I faked my own death -- I could attend my own funeral in disguise and hear what people said about me. Talk about an ego boost! And I bet Frank would have cried too, the big sissy.”

Lister shook his head. “You’re a very strange guy, Rimmer. You’d really have wanted to put your family through that?”

“Yes. Absolutely.” Rimmer didn’t even hesitate before he responded. He sat down on the bottom bunk and sighed. “I bet I never even _had_ a funeral,” he said. “I mean, circumstances being what they were. It’s not like they had a body to bury, so they probably just shrugged their shoulders and got on with their lives.”

Lister sighed. Laying on his bunk, he stared upward at the space above his head. “I’m sure they didn’t,” he said. “I’m sure they were really broken up.”

“Doubtful,” Rimmer told him. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they had a party. A ‘Hurray! Thank smeg we don’t have to think about that embarrassment Arnold anymore’ party.”

Lister shook his head. 

“I bet they had party hats. And those noise-maker things that you blow through. And party poppers too.”

“Rimmer, come on, stop it. What’s the point in torturing yourself like this?”

A pause from the bunk below him, and then, “Well, excuse me. You’ve seemed a bit down the past couple of days, even before the whole seizure thing. I’m sorry for trying to cheer you up.”

“By talking about your funeral?”

“No, by talking about _yours_ … Oh. Yes, I see your point.”

Sometimes Lister wondered how Rimmer had managed to function on a ship surrounded by normal people. And then he remembered, he hadn’t. “I don’t need cheering up, anyway, What I need is something to _do_.” It was strange, Lister had always thought that he was good at doing nothing. Being lazy was one of his best talents. If he really set his mind to it, he would have no problem laying in bed for a week, as long as he had a steady supply of television and curry. He supposed maybe the fact that he couldn’t eat might be getting in his way. 

“Do something, then,” Rimmer suggested.

He _would_ , only he couldn’t think of anything. “Great. Helpful. Any suggestions?”

“Not really,” Rimmer told him. “Why would _I_ have any suggestions?”

Lister sighed. “Doesn’t matter. Forget it.”

“Oh,” said Rimmer. “Because everything you like to do is off limits right now. I see. Well…” He made an exaggerated ‘thinking about it’ face. “The scanner needs recalibrating. The one that didn’t detect the droid when we went over to the ship where you got whacked on the head. You never know when you’re going to need to scan something, and as you’ve proven, it’s better if the results are accurate.”

“What?” Lister got down from his bunk and sat at the table. Where his still unfinished jigsaw taunted him. “You mean you haven’t done it yet? It’s been nearly eight months.”

“It’s been on my list for a while now,” Rimmer told him. “I was going to get to it.”

Lister shook his head. “We’ve been using that,” he said. “Remember last week we passed that moon with the breathable atmosphere and we decided to leave it because it was infested with shapeshifting GELFs? Well what if they weren’t GELFs? What if in reality it was a planet filled with beautiful women just desperate for some company?”

Rimmer shrugged. “Well, I hate to break it to you, Listy, but you’re about as much use to a woman right now as a vibrator with the batteries missing. Less, actually.”

“Oh, great, thanks a lot!”

“Sorry. It’s true though.”

Rimmer wasn’t wrong, actually. Lister sighed slowly through pursed lips and drummed his fingers thoughtfully on one leg. “I could find a nice hologram girl,” he said.

Rimmer shook his head. “Two problems with that, Lister. Firstly, Holly can barely support the two of us. We’ve had to shut down life support to most of the ship just to keep you up and running, so the chances of us being able to support another one are slim to none. Secondly, if we _did_ meet a female hologram, I’ve got dibs.”

“Dibs?” Lister eyed him scornfully. “You can’t call dibs, Rimmer. We’re talking about a person with thoughts and feelings of her own. It’s not up to you who she falls in love with.”

Rimmer shook his head. “And you think that given a choice between the two of us, she’d pick _you_?”

“Maybe. More likely than her picking _you_ anyway,” Lister told him. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter, does it? She doesn’t exist, we made her up.”

“Yes, well if she’s made up, that means I can imagine her wanting to go out with me, doesn’t it?”

Lister folded his arms defensively. “No, it doesn’t. _I_ made her up.”

“Yes, but you said yourself, you can’t call dibs, therefore you can’t do anything to stop me imagining myself charming her into leaving you, and the two of us living happily ever after. Anyway, if she did end up with you, what would happen to your so-called ‘relationship’ when you moved back into your body? That’d throw an ice cold bucket of water over your passions, wouldn’t it?”

Lister sighed. “What are we doing?” he said. “We’re arguing over nothing. Literally.”

“Well, that might be what _you’re_ doing, Lister, but what I’m doing is giving you something to do. You said you were bored, didn’t you?”

Rimmer gave a smug smile. Lister glared at him. “I can hit you now, you know that, right?”

“Okay, okay,” Rimmer said. He raised his hands in mock surrender. “So you don’t want to recalibrate the sensor, probably for the best; you’d need help from the skutters, and honestly they seem to listen to you even less than me, if that’s possible.”

“Yeah,” said Lister, “what’s with that anyway? I’ve always been tight with the skutters. While you were yelling at them for spending two hours cleaning the cinema while a movie was on, I was covering for them, and they knew it.”

“It’s about respect,” Rimmer told him. “They respect me, they don’t respect you. Besides, they know I’d make good on my threat to eject them out of the nearest airlock if they didn’t do what I asked.”

No he wouldn’t. Rimmer needed the skutters. Lister didn’t bother to point that out; Rimmer was already aware.

“What _would_ you be doing right now if you weren’t a hologram?” Rimmer asked. “If we’d never gone to explore that ship, you hadn’t been whacked over the head by a psychotic simulant and none of this had happened, how would you be wasting your time this afternoon?”

Lister thought about it. Honestly, he didn’t know. If he’d been able to touch it, the jigsaw puzzle would have been finished months earlier, and he wasn’t going to put himself through working on it right now.

He had been trying knitting again. Nothing fancy. Nothing with any shape to it at all, actually. A cobbled together mismatch of different colours and types of wool that he had managed to find around the ship, left behind by various members of the crew. He wasn’t very good at it, but he thought he’d been doing okay. Especially considering all he had to go on was a single, half remembered lesson from his grandmother one rainy Sunday afternoon when he hadn’t been able to play out.

Like the jigsaw though, he hadn’t been doing that because he _wanted_ to do it, he had been doing it because there wasn’t a lot to do three million years into deep space when you were the only human in a vast, lonely universe. It definitely wasn’t something he was interested in trying to teach the skutters to do for him.

“So, nothing?” Rimmer said. He looked at him scornfully. “You can’t think of a single thing you would be doing?”

Lister shrugged. “Can you?”

The look on Rimmer’s face told him that no, he couldn’t. Rimmer got to his feet, walked across the room and back, then looked at Lister, triumphant. “Why don’t you educate yourself?” he said.

Lister scowled. “Hey! I’m educated.”

“Debatable, but that’s not what I meant. Holly had every book ever written on any subject ever. They’re all just stored in the database. Why don’t you crack one open and learn something new?”

Lister raised his hands and wiggled his fingers. “I can’t turn the pages.”

Rimmer rolled his eyes. “It wouldn’t be a physical book, you gimboid. It would be on a computer screen. Instead of pressing a button to turn the page, you just ask Holly to do it for you. It’s easy.”

“Oh.” Lister shook his head. “Well, maybe later. I’m not really in the mood for reading right now.”

He was rarely in the mood for reading, if he was honest. And Rimmer knew it.

“Okay,” said Rimmer. “Okay…” He paced the room a couple more times before he sat back down on the bed. “Forget what you would _normally_ be doing. If you could be doing _anything_ right now, what would it be?”

“Does it matter?” Lister asked. After all, if it was something he couldn’t have, what would be the point in torturing himself by thinking about it?

Rimmer didn’t reply. He simply let the question hang in the air.

Lister sighed. He was tempted to go for the flippant answer. He would be laying in bed in his house on Fiji with Kochanski by his side. The two of them would be basking in post-coital afterglow, staring into each other’s eyes, their legs still entwined under the thin, cotton sheet that covered them, while a gentle breeze floated in through the open window. From the next room, he would be able to hear the sound of Jim and Bexley beginning to wake up.

But realistically, because although he wasn’t willing to give up on that particular dream just yet, he had to concede that it wasn’t exactly plausible for the time being, he supposed there was only one thing he really wanted to be doing.

“Eating a curry,” he said.

“That’s it?” Rimmer sounded disappointed.

“No,” Lister assured him. “That’s not ‘it’. Not just any old curry. We’re talking a really _good_ curry. The kind that’s so hot it burns the skin off the roof of your mouth and blunts your taste buds so much you can’t taste anything else for a week, you know? A vindaloo, or maybe even a phall. Oh, and I’d have poppadoms for a starter, huge ones, just the right amount of crunch, piled high with lime pickle, chutney, and a bit of raita. And I’d wash the whole thing down with an ice cold lager or seven.”

“Holly can simulate food,” Rimmer told him. “After a fashion.”

Lister shook his head. “Rimmer, Holly can’t simulate food that she can’t project into your hand or straight down your gob. Call me crazy, but I don’t much fancy being force-fed an entire chicken vindaloo with all the sides.”

“Well, you can still have the lager.” Rimmer tried.

Lister shook his head. “But I don’t want to.”

“I’m just saying, you _could_ , if you wanted to.”

“Have you tasted those hologramatic drinks, Rimmer? They’re so thin and flavourless they might as well be American beer.” Honestly, it was probably a good thing Holly couldn’t recreate a curry; he was sure it would have been a big disappointment. It would have been like one of the microwave meals you got in the freezer aisle at the supermarket. The kind advertised as ‘healthy’, filled with peas and green beans, and all kinds of other things that didn’t belong in a curry. It would maybe have one or two pieces of meat suspended in the most flavourless curry sauce it had ever been his misfortune to try.

“Fine,” Rimmer told him. “You just carry on moping. You just get back on your bunk and stare at the ceiling and look forward to your body healing so you can get transferred back into it and tuck into that curry. Just remember, _some_ of us don’t have that luxury. _Some_ of us died three million years ago and don’t have a body to move back into. So maybe think about that the next time you want to complain.”

“I wasn’t complaining,” Lister told him. “I didn’t say a word ‘til _you_ came in here and started trying to cheer me up. I mean, I was a bit bored, but I was reasonably happy.”

He hadn’t been. Not really. But then, Rimmer hadn’t known that.

“Fine,” Rimmer told him. “I was just trying help, but I’ll just smeg off then, shall I?” He got to his feet and headed for the door.

Lister sighed. “Rimmer, wait.”

The hologram stopped, but didn’t turn around.

“I’m sorry. You’re right, I was moping. But come on, man. You've got to let me mope. I mean, you did enough of it back when Holly first switched you on...”

“With good reason,” Rimmer interjected.

“Well, yeah. Maybe. Look, it’s scary, okay? My body’s down there hooked up to all those machines, being looked after, and there’s _still_ a chance I’m not going to make it, and I can’t… I don’t want to…” he stopped, giving up. He didn’t want to be a hologram forever, but he couldn’t say that. Not to Rimmer. There was nothing wrong with being a hologram, he firmly believed that; always had. That didn’t mean it was easy. Some people just couldn’t hack it, and he was beginning to suspect that he might be one of them.

Rimmer turned. His expression had softened. “Okay,” he said. “So the lager’s not great. Why not try something else. It’s Saturday night, why don’t we go to the bar and get a hologramatic one of those weird cocktails you used to have sometimes?”

Lister thought about it. “I’m not really in the mood,” he said.

“But, it’s Saturday night. That used to be important to you, as I remember. As I’m physically incapable of forgetting, actually. Thanks to the learning drugs I’d taken, that conversation is still rattling around in the back of my mind.”

“Used to be, yeah,” Lister agreed. “What difference does it make now though? If it’s Saturday, or Friday, or some random Tuesday the first week of January? When’s the last time we bothered about it being the weekend?”

Rimmer shrugged. “Well, okay. So it’s a random night. It happens to be a Saturday, but that’s not relevant. Let’s go for a drink.”

Lister closed his eyes and took a deep breath in and out. The guy was really trying. It didn’t seem fair to give him nothing in return. “Fine,” he said. “Let’s get drunk.”

He got up and walked through the door, leaving Rimmer staring after him. “Er… I never said ‘drunk’ he called. “I said ‘drink’ singular. Lister? Lis… fine. Wait for me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to Norwegianpornfaerie for the beta.
> 
> Comments feed the writer!


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Things make a move toward the slashier end of the spectrum here... :-)

Lister took a long sip of his margarita. It wasn’t bad. It wasn’t exactly _good_ either, but it wasn’t bad. Like everything else, there was something missing from it; any semblance of temperature for a start; the drink should have felt cold on his tongue, instead it felt like nothing. Neither did the glass feel cold in his hand, despite the ice cubes that floated on top of the drink. At least the taste was pleasant enough. He was on his fourth drink, and the alcohol, simulated though it was, was beginning to do its job. He could feel himself beginning to relax and see the world through booze-tinted goggles that made everything seem just that little bit less terrible.

“Thanks, man,” he said to Rimmer, sitting next to him nursing a large brandy. “You were right, I needed this.”

Rimmer swirled his brandy around the deep, wide bowl of his glass, then took a sip. He, too, looked as though he was feeling the effect of the drinks. His hair was a mess where he had rubbed his fingers through it without noticing, and he slurred his words slightly as he spoke. “Told you,” he said. “You should listen to me, you know. Sometimes I do actually know what I’m talking about.”

“Yeah,” Lister took another long slurp of his cocktail and licked away the salt that clung to his bottom lip. “Maybe I will. You weren’t wrong about this drink, anyway. Unlike the lager, it actually tastes good. Like it’s meant to.”

Rimmer half-closed his eyes and shook his head. “The lager tastes like it should too,” he said. “The trouble, I think you’ll find, is the lack of everything else. It doesn’t feel cold, it doesn’t have any fizz, all it is, is a taste. Here’s the thing, Listy,” he leaned forward tipsily and paused for dramatic effect, as though he was about to make some great revelation. “You don’t actually like the taste of lager.”

Lister frowned. “‘Course I do,” he said. “Or else why would I keep drinking it?”

“No, I think you’ll find you’re wrong. What you like is the way it cools your mouth down after a curry, or that it quenches your thirst when you need a drink. Or maybe you like that it’s cheap and it gets you drunk, I don’t know. Whatever it is, I guarantee it isn’t the flavour.”

Lister thought about it, trying to decide whether Rimmer was right. He couldn’t be, could he?

“Okay, imagine this,” Rimmer said. “Imagine going into a bar, three million or so years ago when that was a normal thing that people could do. You go in, you order a pint, and you get one that’s exactly the same temperature as the inside of your mouth and totally flat. Would you be happy?”

Lister shrugged. “No, of course not.”

“You sure? It’s still got that lager taste. Delicious, right?”

“No, but it’s lager. It’s not meant to be warm. That’d be like serving chilled toast, or room temperature ice cream.”

Rimmer nodded. “It’s not warm. It’s not anything.”

“Yeah, but…” Lister sighed and shook his head. He wasn’t going to win this; he didn’t know enough about it to argue. “Okay, yeah. Maybe you’re right.”

“Of course I’m right,” Rimmer told him. “I’ve had a lot of time to think about this kind of thing, remember? There’s nothing wrong with enjoying the temperature, or the way it feels in your mouth, it’s just that when you’re a hologram, you don’t get that anymore. All you get is the taste.”

Taking another sip of his margarita, Lister nodded. “Gotcha,” he said. This was terrible. If he really didn’t like lager, that betrayed everything he knew about himself. This was even worse than the time he had gone into a wine bar. “Smeg,” he said to himself.

Rimmer smiled in a self-satisfied way, took a sip of his brandy, then leaned back in his chair and placed his feet on the table.

Lister watched him, remembering his own failed attempt at putting his feet up. He hadn’t tried again since. “Hey,” he said, seizing on the opportunity to think about something else. “How’d you do that?”

“Do what?”

“That.” Lister indicated Rimmer’s feet with a wave of his hand. “I tried it one time and I just fell straight through. Why don’t you?”

Rimmer smiled smugly. “Technique,” he said. “Took me a while to perfect.”

“So, go on then. What’s the trick?”

“Foot position,” Rimmer explained. “The hologramatic projection program knows the soles of my feet aren't supposed to fall through the floor, that’s why I can walk around the ship without my legs sinking in.”

Lister nodded, and deliberately didn’t think about the nightmare he had had several nights earlier when that exact thing had happened to him.

“So all you have to do is tilt your feet so enough of the soles are resting on the table for the program to assume you’re standing. Rest the back of your feet or your legs on the table and yes, they will just fall through.”

“Huh,” Lister said. “Okay.” It actually made sense.

Rimmer shuffled slightly in his chair and without warning, his left leg fell through the table and his foot hit the floor. The right stayed where it was, on the surface of the table. The resulting impact sent a shockwave up his entire body, knocking the brandy in his glass up in a wave, over the top of the oversized glass, where it soaked his hand and spilled onto his uniform trousers.

“Smeg,” he said.

Lister grinned.

“Er… I was just demonstrating what _not_ to do, there.” Rimmer explained. “See how I moved that little bit too far, and… well.” He shook his hand, spraying a shower of hologramatic brandy into the air. The liquid disappeared a second after it left his hand. “That was completely deliberate,” Rimmer continued, as he allowed his other leg to drop through the table too, and pulled the damp patch of uniform away from his skin. He sat up a bit straighter, trying to regain a little dignity. “Holly, do something about this, will you?”

Rimmer’s uniform dried instantly, and a new, full glass of brandy appeared in his other hand. Rimmer gulped the last of the dregs that remained in his old glass, then put it down on the table where it disappeared after a moment.

“Want to try?” Rimmer asked him.

Lister eyed the table suspiciously and shook his head. “Maybe later.” 

Rimmer shrugged as though that made no sense whatsoever, and, Lister noticed, didn’t put his feet back on the table.

Lister took another sip of his drink, and found it all gone. “Hey Holly? Can I get another one too?” he asked.

Holly appeared on the nearest viewscreen. “Seriously? ‘Holly, dry my clothes,’ ‘Holly get me another drink,’ you two are demanding tonight, aren’t you?”

“Please?”

Holly rolled her eyes. “Fine.” The glass in his hand was replaced by a full one. Lister immediately took a sip. For a liquid with no discernable temperature or texture, it wasn’t half bad. Another couple though, and he was going to have one _hell_ of a hangover in the morning.

Which made him think, actually. “Hey, here’s a question I’ve been wondering about,” he said. “Whoever thought it would be a good idea to give holograms hangovers? I mean, it’s not like it’s real booze, it’s just the program messing with your spatial awareness and lowering your inhibitions every time you have a sip. So it seems a bit unnecessary, don’t you think?”

Rimmer appeared to consider the question. “No, there is a reason. It’s because whoever came up with the idea of resurrecting the dead in hologramatic form was a sadist who wanted to make sure I couldn’t have too much fun without suffering in the morning.”

Lister smiled. “Seriously though.”

“I am serious.” Rimmer took another sip of his brandy, then frowned. “No, actually, I _do_ know this one. Imagine you died, got brought back as a hologram and presented with this long list of things you can’t do anymore.”

Lister stirred his hologramatic straw around his hologramatic glass, jostling hologramatic ice cubes against one another. “Doesn’t take that much imagination,” he said, staring down into his drink.

“You’re not dead, Lister. You have no idea what it’s like to…” Rimmer sighed and shook his head. “Never mind. Fine. And I don’t mean now, by the way, I’m talking about three million years ago, when the human race still existed and living out the rest of your existence on Red Dwarf might not be the way you’d planned your future. On-ship holograms are -- were -- basically the property of the Space Corps. They didn’t get planet leave or the option of resigning their commission and retiring to Fiji, you know.”

Lister nodded. Smeg. He’d never really thought of it like that.

“So, imagine all that, and then imagine they tell you that you can drink as much as you like every night, with no consequences. What do you think would happen?”

“A whole lot of alcoholic holograms.”

Rimmer nodded. “Exactly. So they probably had to decide between us not being able to get drunk, or having to deal with hangovers the same as living people. Honestly, I think they made the right choice.”

He raised his glass in mock salute to whatever computer programmer had made that decision.

Lister was inclined to agree. “I wonder if we’ll still feel that way in the morning though,” he mused.

“Probably not,” Rimmer agreed.

They each took a sip of their drinks, and sank into silence. It was quiet in the bar. Lister missed the noise; the music, the shouting over it to try to make yourself heard, the occasional smashed glass. He supposed quiet was better though, for this.

“Hey, I’ve been meaning to say,” he said.

Rimmer turned to look at him. His gaze was unfocussed under the influence of the drinks. “What?” he asked.

Lister tapped his fingers on his glass and looked away. “I’m sorry,” he told him.

Rimmer paused with his drink inches from his lips, and frowned. “What did you do?” he asked suspiciously.

“No, not… Nothing. Well, nothing like… not a specific thing. It’s more of a general apology, for everything.”

“For the moping around?” Rimmer asked.

“No, going back further than that.”

Rimmer took a deep breath and let out a long sigh. “Okay, frankly Lister, there’s a lot you should apologise for over the years, starting with the day you moved into my quarters and proceeded to make the place look and smell like a literal dump, right up to a few minutes ago when you laughed at me for falling through the table.”

Lister smirked. “Yeah, I am sorry about that, but I was mostly only laughing because I’d done the same thing.”

“Well, whatever it is that you’re on about, you’re going to have to be a tad more specific.”

Lister sighed. He didn’t _want_ to be specific. What he wanted was to say something vague, and for Rimmer to somehow, magically, understand exactly what he meant. He already knew that was too much to ask for. Rimmer wasn’t the most empathetic of people even when he was sober. Five or six drinks in, he had no chance.

Lister looked away, focussing his gaze firmly on his drink. He rolled the back of a fingernail against the tip of the glass, crushing the hologramatic salt to dust. “I’m sorry for the way I treated you sometimes,” he said quietly. “You know, back when I first got out of stasis. I probably wasn’t as, uh… sensitive… as I could have been, to what was going on with you.”

Rimmer didn’t reply. Lister’s fingers found a loose thread in the stitching of his jacket and began to pick at it.

“I mean, the way you acted back then, _some_ of the way you acted, I thought it was just you trying to drive me nuts, but now I see that maybe it wasn’t _all_ because you’re a total smeghead. Some of it might have been because a lot of the time, being a hologram is actually kind of crappy.”

He took a deep breath, and had a large gulp of his drink, draining the glass. He still didn’t look at Rimmer. It felt like cheating, to apologise without even having the nerve to look him in the eye, but it was the only way he would have been able to get through it. 

“So, anyway,” he added. “I’m sorry. I’ve been meaning to say that for a while.”

Still silence from the seat next to him. When he couldn’t stand it any longer, Lister turned to sneak a glance at Rimmer. The hologram hadn’t moved. He was fidgeting with his brandy glass in much the same way the Lister was with his own drink, rotating it slowly in his hands and watching the liquid as it moved around the glass. Lister put his glass down on the table and folded his arms. 

Rimmer cleared his throat. “Thank you,” he said, finally.

Lister smiled awkwardly. “But _some_ of it was definitely because you’re a smeghead,” he added. “Don’t think you get a free pass on that.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Rimmer assured him. He finished off his brandy and put the empty glass on the table next to Lister’s. “You know, you might be a revolting, malodorous excuse for a man, but deep down, you’re not _that_ bad. Sometimes. When I’ve had a few drinks I almost enjoy your company.”

And that, Lister supposed, was probably the closest he was going to get to a compliment from Rimmer. He grinned. “Although, it’s not all bad being a hologram, is it? He asked. “I mean, we’ve been here for three hours now, drinking steadily the whole time. Normally I’d have needed to pee at least once.”

Rimmer shot him a revolted look. “And I should have known you’d ruin it by saying something disgusting.”

Lister affected a confused frown. “What’s disgusting about not peeing?”

“It’s… never mind.” Rimmer shook his head dismissively.

“So,” said Lister, “am I forgiven then?”

Rimmer frowned thoughtfully. “It’s not on you know, you doing this when we’re drunk,” he said. “What if I say yes, then change my mind in the morning when I’ve sobered up?”

Lister shrugged. “I guess that’s a risk you’ve got to take.”

“Fine.” Rimmer tapped his hinges thoughtfully on his knee. “How about this? I _provisionally_ forgive you for some of your inconsiderate behaviour, because it looks like you’ve thoroughly learned your lesson the past few months, _but_ I reserve the right to change my mind in the morning.”

“I guess that’s fair.”

“Good.”

Rimmer offered his hand and Lister took it. They shook, and Rimmer’s touch lingered that little bit longer than a handshake needed to be. Lister felt Rimmer’s thumb run lightly over the back of his hand. His grip loosened and Rimmer’s other hand began to explore the texture of Lister’s fingerless leather glove, the tips of his fingers circling each metal stud.

Watching, Lister smiled, and Rimmer immediately stopped. “Sorry.”

“No, don’t be,” Lister told him. “Keep going.”

They had fallen into a pattern of casual touches since the first time. Pats on the shoulder, handshakes, even the occasional quick embrace, but he could tell that Rimmer still needed more. He could tell, because he felt the same way.

Rimmer shook his head. He reached for his glass, realised it was empty, picked it up anyway and began to fidget with it again.

Lister shook his head. He took the glass from Rimmer’s hands and put it back on the table. “It’s fine, Rimmer. You can touch me.”

“Maybe I don’t _want_ to touch you,” Rimmer told him. “I know where you’ve been.”

Lister shrugged. “That’s fine, I guess,” he said. “How about if I touch you?”

Rimmer looked vaguely terrified at the prospect. “What do you mean?”

Lister shrugged, “Do you trust me?”

“Not as far as I could throw you.”

He supposed that was fair. He hadn’t exactly proven himself completely trustworthy in the past. He stood, and slowly walked around Rimmer until he was standing directly behind him. Rimmer twisted around to watch him suspiciously. “Can you _try_ to trust me?” he asked.

Rimmer licked his lips, then nodded. “I suppose… If you… Why? What are you going to do?”

“You know what you said a couple of weeks ago?” Lister said. He reached out and ran his fingers over the tips of Rimmer’s slightly unkempt curls. His hair was longer than he usually wore it, and so much softer than Lister had imagined. “About being touch starved,” he clarified. “I asked Holly about it.”

“You did what?” Rimmer turned to look at him again. “Lister, that’s private!”

Lister shook his head. He flexed his fingers and placed his hands, fingers spread wide, on Rimmer’s shoulders and neck. “Relax,” he said. “I didn’t mention you, I made out like I was talking about me.” Well, sort of. Anyway, they were talking about a computer that had counted every single word Lister had ever spoken to both Rimmer and Kochanski, and probably every other crew member of Red Dwarf, from the time he had boarded the ship to the time he had gone into stasis. Somehow, he didn’t think that anybody had any real privacy.

He began to knead his fingers into Rimmer’s neck and shoulders, gently at first, varying the pressure slightly as he moved his fingers in slow circles, simply trying to give Rimmer as much sensation as he could.

He could see that Rimmer was trying not to enjoy it, or at least trying not to _show_ that he was enjoying it, and he could also see the exact moment that he gave in, and briefly allowed his eyes to close as he shifted his position to allow Lister’s fingers better access to his left shoulder. Lister grinned to himself and concentrated his efforts there for a moment, pressing his fingers into the skin where he could, and into Rimmer’s uniform where he could not, kneading and pressing on the muscles of Rimmer’s neck, shoulders and upper back.

“Lister…” Rimmer said. “This is…” He stopped mid sentence and made a noise that was close enough to a groan of pleasure that Lister had to grin again.

“Still got it,” Lister said, more to himself than to Rimmer.

“Huh?”

Lister continued with the massage, feeling for the points of tension -- and there were so many of them -- and pressing his fingers into them until the muscle relented. “Magic fingers,” he said. ‘Every one of my exes, every _single_ one, said I gave the best massages they’d ever had,” he explained. “Even had a few of them come back for them after we’d split up.”

A little of Rimmer’s tension appeared to come back. “Lister, if this is the opening move of some bizarre Liverpudlian courting ritual…”

Lister rolled his eyes. “First off, ‘courting’? When did you move to nineteenth century Earth? Second, no it’s not, but if it _was_ , this is usually move two or three.” He found a particularly tense spot, and Rimmer flinched. Lister pressed a knuckle into the muscle and waited.

“Er… that hurts, Lister,” Rimmer told him warningly.

“I know. It won’t for long. Wait for it…”

He felt Rimmer relax as the discomfort faded away, then pushed into the same knot again, just to test. Nothing.

Rimmer flexed his shoulder experimentally, “I don’t know how you did that, Lister,” Rimmer said, “But that shoulder’s been bothering me for a week, and now it’s fine.”

There was something ridiculous and very unfair about the fact that a hologram could experience muscle tension, but then, given that the hologram in question was Rimmer, he supposed he shouldn’t be surprised. He was so tense that Lister had often suspected that if he ever really relaxed, he might fall down.

“You know, I do pretty great back rubs too,” he said. “And feet. We’d have to go back to our quarters for that, though, not sure it’s appropriate in the middle of the bar.” Gradually, he decreased the pressure, then pulled his hands away. “You want some kind of oil, too, for a really good massage,” he added. “Coconut’s my favourite. Think Holly could manage that?”

Rimmer turned to look at him, he didn’t say a word, but his expression said ‘you’re not serious?’

Lister grinned, then shrugged. “I’m sure she can manage it. The awkward part’d be explaining why we want it. We’ll maybe do that another time, yeah?”

Rimmer got to his feet. He turned out of reach of Lister’s hands, then reached out toward Lister himself. He placed his hands on Lister’s shoulders, then allowed them to run down his arms, and back up again, before finally snaking around the sensitive skin at the back of his neck. Lister stood passively, letting him do what he needed. Rimmer stepped a little closer, and Lister saw that his pupils were wide; the low lighting in the bar or the act of touching and being touched Lister couldn’t be sure.

Rimmer moved closer still. His lips parted slightly as he angled his head down, toward Lister’s. Instinctively, Lister reacted in kind, looking up at him. Warning alarms sounded in his head, and he knew that he needed to stop this. They were drunk, and Rimmer was perhaps high on sensation, not to mention, it was _Rimmer_ that he was about to kiss. He knew it was a bad idea, but somehow he couldn’t bring himself to stop. 

Their lips brushed against one another softly, barely a touch of skin on skin. Rimmer’s lips were dry and so warm. Lister felt Rimmer’s breath against him. It lasted no more than a second, and then it was over.

Rimmer pulled back and stared at him, eyes wide with terror. “I…” he began. He backed off a step.

“Well,” Lister said. He smiled in what he hoped looked a reassuring way. “That was a nice surprise.”

Rimmer backed off another step and turned to run. Lister grabbed hold of his hand before he could flee. 

“Hey,” he said. “Please don’t. You know I’m only going to come and find you again, like the last time you ran off.”

“I told you,” Rimmer insisted. “I didn’t run off last time, I had something I…”

“Needed to do. Yeah, you said.” Lister realised he was still holding onto Rimmer’s hand. He let go. If he really wanted to run, he didn’t want him to feel that he couldn’t.

“I’m sorry,” Rimmer said. He folded his arms defensively across his chest. “I didn’t mean… I don’t know why I did that.”

Lister waved off the apology. “It’s my irresistible charm,” he said. “I told you I’ve snogged some of my mates after a few drinks. What I didn’t mention is mostly they snogged me. And some of them were completely straight. Or they said they were.”

“Like me,” Rimmer said.

Lister shrugged. “Sure. If you say so.”

Rimmer’s folded arms grew tighter. More defensive. Great, all the tension Lister had worked out of him was back.

“Don’t flatter yourself, Lister. It’s been so long I’d probably have kissed _anyone_ if I’d had the chance.”

“But you didn’t. You kissed me. And it’s fine, Rimmer. Don’t stress about it.”

“I’m not attracted to you.”

Lister smiled. “I know. I’m not attracted to you either.”

“No, I mean _really_ , I’m not.”

Lister nodded, he tried not to take that as an insult, after all, it was just an expression of fact. “Rimmer, it’s fine. I know you’re not. If you were, I’d have noticed before now. Don’t feel weird about it. It was nice, actually.”

Rimmer bristled, then frowned in confusion. “Nice? Really?”

“Yeah. I mean, unexpected but yeah, nice. And I get it; it’s not sexual or anything, it’s… sensual. It’s about touch.” Lister stepped closer, closing the distance between then, and took Rimmer's hand in his. Cradling it in one hand, he began to run his fingers in a circle on the back. “Just like this,” he said.

Rimmer appeared to relax. He rewarded Lister with the smallest of smiles. “It was a very good neck rub,” he said.

Lister grinned. “And If that’s how you react after a neck rub, I can’t wait to see what you’d do after a full back massage.”

Rimmer folded his arms defensively, and Lister immediately regretted the joke.

“Sorry.” He said. “Bad joke. Come on, let's get out of here. I think we’ve both had more than enough to drink for one night.”

Rimmer sighed, then nodded. “And Lister, if you tell _anybody_ about what just happened…”

“Yeah, I know,” Lister told him. “Don’t worry, I’ll be keeping this to myself.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to Norwegianpornfaerie for the beta again ♥
> 
> If you're enjoying this story, I'd really really love a comment to let me know. They make me a better writer, you know. If you're not liking it, feel free to let me know why not.


	12. Chapter 12

Rimmer carefully examined the two guitars, one leaning against the wall of their sleeping quarters and the other, right next to it, doing a reasonably convincing impression of the same thing.

“No,” he said. He shook his head. “No no _no_ , Holly. It’s totally different. You need to make it look the _same_.”

They had been at this for over an hour and for some reason Holly still wasn’t getting it.

From the viewscreen, Holly appeared to look from one guitar to the other. In actual fact, Rimmer knew that she was looking from the microcameras positioned around the room, and around the whole ship. They were always on, always aware, giving the computer a 360 degree view of everything that happened on board. There were no secrets from Holly. Rimmer tried not to think about that too hard, because thinking about it reminded him that Holly knew exactly what he had used to get up to with Inflatable Ingrid when he had been alive, and he would rather not think about that, thank you very much.

She looked for a long time, eyes flicking from right to left as she appeared to switch her gaze from one guitar to the other. Finally she sighed in exasperation. “They’re the same, Arnold,” she told him.

Rimmer, crouching on the floor near the two instruments, shook his head. “No they’re not. They’re completely different.” He pointed to the first guitar, the original. “This one here, it’s black, yes, but it’s more of a charcoal black, whereas this one,” he pointed at the second instrument, “This one is very clearly onyx.”

“Clearly,” Holly said. Rimmer caught the sarcasm in her voice, and he didn’t care for it.

“And you see the damage on this one? The cigarette burn on the front there? On this other one, it’s about a millimetre too far to the left.”

Holly sighed. “It’s the same. I did a complete three dimensional scan of the thing. I can guarantee with 101 percent certainty that they are identical.”

“Er… 101?” Rimmer frowned. “You can’t have more than 100 percent certainty, Holly.”

She frowned. “Can too,” she said. “And I’m 106% certain of that.”

Rimmer placed his head in his hands and wondered, not for the first time, how the universe could have been so cruel as to sentence him to an eternity in deep space with these idiots. “I don’t care if you think it’s a million percent accurate, Holly, they’re not the same. Come on! You’re a supercomputer with a reported IQ of six thousand. I mean, granted you lost a couple of zeros from that figure over the years, and to be perfectly honest I was never convinced by that whole ‘six thousand’ boast in the first place, but despite all that, surely a computer should still have a better eye for detail than I do.”

Holly rolled her eyes theatrically. “Well yeah,” she said. “I do. That’s how come I can see they’re the same.” She sank into silence for a moment, then sighed. “Okay, look. You’re right, I should have a better eye for detail than you. So there’s only two possible explanations for why we disagree.”

“Go on then,” Rimmer told her.

“First one is, I can’t see any difference because there _is_ no difference. They’re exactly the same and _you’re_ the one that’s wrong.”

“No, that can’t be it,” Rimmer told her dismissively. “What’s the other possibility?”

Holly frowned. “I’ve forgotten,” she said. “Funny, I knew it a minute ago.”

Rimmer raised his eyes upward in a ‘give me strength’ gesture to a God that he didn’t believe in, and who, if he ever _had_ existed in the first place, had almost certainly long since abandoned the remaining crew of a long-forgotten mining ship. “Great,” he said. “Fine. Let’s agree to disagree. Just move the cigarette burn one… no, one point five millimetres to the left, and adjust the colour.”

“If you say so,” Holly intoned. The cigarette burn shifted to the correct position. Rimmer looked at it again, and frowned. Actually, now it was too far to the right. Maybe Holly had been right after all.

Well, there was no way he was going to tell her that. He’d never hear the end of it.

“Great,” he said. “Just one thing to check.” He reached out with one hand and strummed his fingers across the strings of the holographic guitar. The sound was hideous; a discordant mess that made him cringe in discomfort and wish that he was deaf. “Perfect,” he said. “Where is Lister anyway?”

“About twenty metres away, heading in this direction,” Holly told him.

“What? I said _warn_ me when he’s on his way.” Rimmer jumped backward, away from the door, and sat down on his bunk at the exact same moment Lister entered the room. Either Lister sprinted those twenty metres, or Holly had miscalculated again.

Lister looked around the room before settling a suspicious gaze on Rimmer. “What’s going on?” he asked.

“Going on?” Rimmer said. “Nothing. What makes you think anything’s going on?”

Lister’s suspicion appeared to deepen. “Because when I walked in here, you leaped back like you’d been doing something you shouldn’t, and then sat down on the bunk trying to look nonchalant.”

Rimmer nodded. It was Holly’s fault of course. If he’d had just a _few_ more seconds to prepare, he could have been much more convincing. Luckily, it wasn’t as though he was saving the gift for a special occasion. It was done, or as done as it was going to be.

He got to his feet. “Well, something _was_ going on, as it happens,” he said.

Lister nodded. “I know. That’s what I said. So, what were you up to?”

RImmer folded his arms. “I resent that, actually,” he said. “I resent the fact that you just _assume_ I’m ‘up to’ something, like I’ve always got some nefarious scheme on the go like some cartoon bad guy on one of those terrible TV shows you like to watch.”

Lister sighed. He sat down and shook his head. “Will you relax? It’s a figure of speech. When you say ‘What are you up to’? it means ‘what are you doing?’ It’s like when you bump into your mate unexpectedly and you go ‘Alright?’ it doesn’t mean you think there’s something wrong, it’s just a way of saying hello.”

Rimmer frowned. Was it? He wondered what the correct response was in that case. He suspected that maybe he shouldn’t have been saying “fine thanks’ all those years. “Yes, I know that. Obviously,” he said.

“So, what were you up to?”

Rimmer straightened up proudly. “I was making something, actually,” he said. Keeping his eye on Lister to see his reaction, he indicated the guitar with a wave of his hand.

Lister looked confused. He glanced around the room, then back to Rimmer “Okay. What were you making?”

“What do you mean ‘what’? The gui…” he stopped. The guitar had disappeared. “Er, Holly, where did it go?”

Holly appeared back on the screen. “Where did what go?” she asked.

One of these days, he was going to send one of the skutters into Holly’s inner wiring and have them perform a lobotomy. The result couldn’t possibly be any worse than what they had now. “You know what, you stupid computer. The thing that we just spent an hour making, and that you have now blinked out of existence. Put it back.”

“Oh, right,” Holly said. “Why didn’t you say?”

The holographic copy of the guitar reappeared next to Lister’s real one. Lister looked at it, then back to Rimmer, and then to the guitar again. “Is that…? He said. He took a step forward, toward the guitar, then hesitated. “Is it real?” he asked.

“Well, no,” Rimmer told him. “It’s a hologram.”

“No, I mean can I…” Lister reached out hesitantly, as though he expected for the guitar to disappear, or for his hand to pass through it as it would the genuine instrument. When his fingertips connected with the neck of the guitar. His eyes widened in surprise, and his hand closed around it.

“You did this?” he asked.

Rimer tried to look modest. “Well, Holly helped. A bit. But basically, yes.”

Lister plucked one of the strings with the well-chewed nail of his right index finger. It reverberated unpleasantly around the room, and Rimmer tried not to cringe. Lister plucked each string in turn, eyes closed and an expression of pure joy on his face. When he opened his eyes to look at Rimmer again, he was smiling in a way that Rimmer didn’t remember seeing in… well, since the accident.

“Why?” he asked.

Rimmer frowned. “What do you mean ‘why’?

Lister strummed the guitar, the fingers of his left hand pressing the strings to play a chord. Or they would have, if the guitar had been anything close to in tune. It occurred to Rimmer that perhaps he should have asked Holly for it to be slightly less true to life in that regard. “You hate my guitar. You’ve threatened to have the skutters smash it up more times than I can count. You said it was noise pollution, hazardous to health. You said it should have a warning sign on it.”

It was a fair point. He had said and done all of that. One one occasion, before he had died, he had come within inches of actually snapping the damn thing in two. Until Lister had jumped down from the bed in a panicked attempt to save it, and crushed Rimmer’s foot. He’d limped for a week after that.

He looked away, feeling awkward suddenly. The truth was, Lister had given him something, when he had placed his arms around him and allowed him to experience his first real hug in… well, he wasn’t sure, but it had been a hell of a lot longer than three million years. When he had kneaded the tension out of his neck and shoulders, when he had let Rimmer touch him and not recoiled in revulsion. Lister had given him something, and he had wanted to give him something back.

Not to mention, there was a chance that he might feel a _teensy_ bit guilty for something he had thought a few days earlier. It wasn’t his fault, of course; it wasn’t like he could be held accountable for the thoughts that popped unbidden into his head, but after Lister’s seizure, he had, briefly, hoped for worse news. It wasn’t that he would exactly be _happy_ if Lister needed to stay as a hologram, but he definitely wouldn’t have been _un_ happy about it either.

He shrugged. “I didn’t have anything better to do,” he said.

Lister gave him a look, and Rimmer was certain that he understood. He understood the first reason, anyway, though he was frustratingly perceptive and there was always a chance he had picked up on the second one too. “Thanks man,” he said. “Come ‘ere.” Still clutching the guitar to his chest, Lister wrapped his arms around Rimmer. For a moment, squashing the guitar between them.

Rimmer hesitated, before he put his own arms around Lister. It felt so good. He tried to remind himself that it was _Lister_ that he was hugging. Slobby, revolting Lister whose dirty laundry set off the chemical waste alarm on two separate occasions. Lister, who he had once watched wake up, strain five cigarette butts out of a warm can of lager with a tea strainer and chug the drink for breakfast. He was disgusting, and right now, Rimmer didn’t care one bit.

“You don’t know what this means to me,” Lister added.

No, Rimmer supposed. He probably didn’t. He had never been musically gifted. Of course, neither was Lister -- in fact, if there was such a thing as the _opposite_ of musically gifted, that was Lister -- but he enjoyed it. He could lose himself in it and forget his troubles. Rimmer had always envied him that ability, and he knew that being cut off from it, whether it was temporary or not, had been difficult for him.

Finally, Lister patted Rimmer on the back, the universal signal for ‘that’s enough hugging now’, and took a step back. Holding the guitar reverentially in his hands, he brushed his fingers over the smooth surface of its body and the rough damage of the cigarette burn.

“It takes a lot of power to generate,” Rimmer told him. “Keeping you and me going at the same time is taxing enough on power reserves as it is, so Holly tells me it’ll disappear when you’re not using it, so she can use the power for other things. You’ll need to ask for it when you want it back.”

“Yeah, okay,” Lister agreed, still stroking the guitar like it was some kind of pet.

“And don’t spend too long playing, or we might need to skimp on light or heating.”

No reply.

“Lister, did you hear me?”

Lister wasn’t listening anymore. He had sat down on Rimmer’s bunk and started to pluck the strings one by one, a faraway look on his face.

Rimmer nodded, satisfied. He backed away a couple of steps, then headed for the door.

“Hey, where are you going?” Lister asked him.

“Away,” Rimmer told him. “I’ve done my good deed for the day. Just because I gave you that thing doesn’t mean I should have to suffer though listening to you play it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments are loved and cherished.
> 
> Thanks once again to Norwegianpornfaerie for the beta :-)


	13. Chapter 13

Lister scootched over as far as he could get on the narrow bunk, making sure to leave ample room. Laying on his side and facing out into the room, he propped his head up on one hand, and watched as Rimmer paced the room several times, nervously. This had been going on for some time now, and Lister was beginning to suspect that Rimmer was having second thoughts.

Honestly, it didn’t surprise him. It had been a shock when Rimmer had agreed to this in the first place. “We don’t have to do this, you know,” Lister reminded him. “It was just an idea.”

“I know. I know that,” Rimmer told him. He paced the room two more times before taking a deep breath, turning a full 180 and striding purposefully toward the bunk. He was dressed for bed; legs and arms bare, wearing nothing but a white t-shirt and a pair of boxers, and as he approached the bed, a wave of near panic threatened to overcome Lister.

What was he doing? What had he been _thinking_? What had possessed him to suggest this? He couldn’t even use the excuse that he had been drunk, he had been completely sober when he had made the suggestion, and Rimmer had been completely sober when he had frowned, thought about it, and then nodded.

As Rimmer got closer, something that sounded embarrassingly like a giggle escaped Lister’s lips. His hand clapped to his mouth to cover the sound, and he looked at Rimmer apologetically. Rimmer, who was now staring at him like he had just realised what a horrible mistake he had made.

“Sorry,” Lister told him. “It’s just…”

“Weird,” Rimmer finished for him. “Yes, I agree.”

Lister shook his head. “That wasn’t what I was going to say, actually. It’s not weird, it’s just…” he floundered slightly, then shrugged. “Strange.”

“That’s the same thing!”

“No it’s not. Strange as in different, not strange as in weird.”

Rimmer folded his arms. “It’s not going to work anyway, there’s no space left in the bed, you’re taking up all the room. If you want to do this, we’re going to have to move quarters.”

Lister shook his head. “They’re all a standard size. I mean, higher ranks got more space and more amenities, but the bed size is the same. Even the captain didn’t get extra room, he just didn’t have to share. You know we checked out a few different cabins before we chose this one. I dunno about you, but I think I’d have noticed if there was one with a double bed.”

“It doesn’t have to be a double bed, just not a tiny bunk. Even the quarters I shared with my duplicate that time had two singles.”

“What difference would that make?”

Rimmer sighed. “Well, none, I suppose. But maybe we could get the skutters to push them together.”

“They’re nailed down, Rimmer, and they’re all the same. You know, me and the lads used to joke that the bunk size was the Space Corps’ attempt at contraception.”

Rimmer gave him a look. “Well, we certainly don’t need _that_ do we?”

“No, it was a joke. You know, we don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.”

“I do want to,” Rimmer insisted. “I’m just concerned about the space. I don’t want to wake up in the middle of the night because you’ve turned over and elbowed me in the nose.”

Lister rolled his eyes. “I’ve shared a bed before and managed not to injure anybody. I assume we both have.”

“Er…. yes,” Rimmer said, quickly. “Yes, absolutely. Dozens of… _hundreds_ of times.”

“Well alright then.” Lister told him. He patted the empty part of the bed invitingly.

Rimmer approached the bed carefully, as though he was trying to creep up on it unnoticed. He sat on the edge, then lay down awkwardly on his back, leaving a gap between the two of them so that he almost hung off the edge of the bunk. “You’re right,” he said. “This is fine.”

Lister rolled his eyes. “Shuffle up, you idiot. The whole point of sharing a bed was to share the space, you know? If you hang off the side like that, I might as well get back in the top bunk.”

“No, don’t do that,” Rimmer told him. “I’ll… He shuffled a little closer, so his body just about touched Lister’s. “Okay?” he said, then paused. “Well, I was right. This feels incredibly weird.”

Lister laughed and lay back down. “Yeah, it does a bit. Well we’ll either like it or we won’t. And if we don’t, we just won’t do it again, okay?”

“And your socks will stay on all night, right? Your feet are disgusting, and I have no intention of contracting hologramatic athlete’s foot, thank you very much.”

Lister shook his head. “I haven’t got hologramatic athlete's foot, Rimmer.”

“Well you had the non-hologramatic version. God knows how, You’re not exactly the athletic type, are you?”

There didn’t seem to be any point arguing. “Socks stay on,” he promised.

Rimmer nodded, satisfied. “So, how do we do this?”

Lister shuffled up, further closing the distance between them. “I dunno,” he said. “Depends. Are you a big spoon or a little spoon?”

“A what?” Rimmer, turned his head to look at Lister.

“You know, like spoons in a drawer, would you be the one in front, or the one behind?”

Rimmer shook his head, apparently completely baffled. “Behind what?”

“The other sp… never mind. You’ve really never done this before, have you?”

“Shared a bed with another man? No, now you mention it, I haven’t.”

“Shared a bed with another _person_ ,” Lister clarified. “I mean, for longer than it takes to get your end away and then scoff down a pizza.”

Silence from Rimmer was all the answer that Lister needed, and suddenly he felt bad for bringing it up. 

“Okay, lay on your side,” Lister told him. He pointed out into the room, “Facing that way.”

Rimmer hesitated for a moment before he rolled over. “Like this?”

“Yeah, now I’m just going to…” Lister shuffled a little closer, pressing his body against Rimmer’s back, then rested his arm over Rimmer’s body. “See,” he said. “Spoons.”

“Lister, this is nothing like a spoon.”

Lister rolled his eyes and snuggled a little closer. “Fine, call it what you like. Is it okay though? Think you can sleep like this?”

Rimmer took hold of Lister’s hand, the one resting over his chest, and held onto it. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m so used to not feeling anything as I fall asleep. I used to enjoy the feeling of the sheets against my skin, or the pillow being cool against my face. Now, I can’t even remember what it felt like. This… it’s a lot.”

Lister nodded, his head pressed against the back of Rimmer’s neck. “I get it. If it’s too much, just let me know, okay?”

Rimmer shivered. “Sorry, your breath on my neck,” he said.

Lister tried to angle his head away. “Sorry.”

“No, don’t be. It’s nice. It’s just, like I said. A lot.”

Lister squeezed Rimmer’s hand gently. Maybe this had been a mistake. Maybe it was too much. It was a lot for _him_ ; he couldn’t imagine how much more intense it felt for Rimmer.

“Okay,” Rimmer said. “So then we just go to sleep?”

Lister laughed. “Well, unless there’s something else you’d rather do, but you made it pretty clear you weren’t interested.”

Rimmer’s body temperature increased noticeably as he blushed in embarrassment. “That’s not what I meant.”

Pushing his luck, Lister placed a gentle kiss on the back of his neck, “Yeah, Rimmer, we just go to sleep. The door’s locked, right?” The last thing they needed was for the Cat or Kryten to wander in in the morning and get the wrong idea.

“Yeah,” Rimmer said around a barely suppressed yawn. “Holly, lights.”

The sleeping quarters were plunged into darkness, or as close to darkness as they ever got, and Lister wrapped his arms a little tighter around Rimmer, and closed his eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ♥ ♥ comments are loved ♥ ♥


	14. Chapter 14

“That one,” Lister said. He pointed to one of the cards arranged face down on the table between himself and Cat.

Cat reached across and turned the card over to reveal a crudely drawn cartoon of a woman, naked from the waist up, with long dark hair covering the nipples of her ample breasts.

“Oh, I’ve seen that one before!” Cat told him excitedly. “Now, where was it…?”

Lister sighed. He pointed to another card, to the left of the table. “It’s there,” he said. “You turned it over on your last go.”

Cat looked dubious, but turned over the card. His eyes widened in amazement. “Hey! That’s right! How do you keep doing that?”

“You just have to remember the cards you’ve seen before,” Lister told him.

Cat shrugged, apparently baffled. He picked up the cards with the two identical naked women on them, and placed them in the growing pile of cards in front of Lister.

“Cat, it’s not that hard. It’s a kids game,” Lister told him.

“Seriously? You let _kids_ play a game where all the cards have naked women on them? What’s _wrong_ with you humans?”

Lister rolled his eyes. “No the _game_ , not this particular set of cards. It’s called ‘pairs’, and you can make pairs of anything, these just happen to be the cards I’ve got. I found them in Petersen’s locker. The ones I had as a kid had, like, cows and pigs and things on them. Your turn.”

Cat looked at the remaining cards on the table, then snatched two at random. He turned them over to reveal two completely different half-naked women. He grinned widely. “Hey, I’m so good at this. You keep picking ones that are the same!”

“That’s the whole point of the game,” Lister told him. He looked at his collection of pairs, and then at the empty table in front of Cat. “You do get that, right?”

Cat laughed. “No it isn’t! The point of the game is to see as many beautiful women as possible. You keep losing by matching them up and taking them out of play.”

Lister stared at him. They had been playing for twenty minutes; he couldn’t work out how Cat could have misunderstood.

“Cat…” he began.

“I wouldn’t bother, Lister,” Rimmer told him, from the other side of the room. “Like you said, it’s a children’s game. You can hardly expect him to understand something so sophisticated.”

Cat turned a glare in Rimmer’s direction. “Hey, now you listen to me…”

Whatever he had been able to say was interrupted by the sound of the door opening and Kryten bustling into the room. “Mister Lister, I’ve been looking for you everywhere. Thank goodness I’ve found you! I have news about your medical condition.”

Lister sucked in a sharp intake of breath as the bottom dropped out of his stomach. He tried to read Kryten’s body language and decide whether it was good or bad news, but he couldn’t.

Rimmer folded his arms. “Er, Kryten, _where_ exactly have you been looking? I mean, I know it’s a large ship, but we don’t very often mount exploratory expeditions through the lower decks, do we? Generally speaking, you’re going to find us in one of maybe three or four places, and if we’re not there, you can always ask Holly.”

“Yes sir, and I did look in three of those four places, this was the fourth.”

“Then you haven’t exactly been looking ‘everywhere’ then, hav…”

“Hey!” Lister got to his feet and placed himself between Rimmer and Kryten. He waved a dismissive hand in Rimmer’s general direction. “Shut up, man. He’s got news. What is it, Kryten? Is he… am _I_ okay?”

“Okay?” Kryten repeated. “No. The thing is, I’ve been monitoring some changes in your condition over the past couple of days, and, well…” he paused.

Lister leaned forward, willing the mechanoid to continue. “And what? Spit it out, Kryten. Am I dying? I’m dying, aren’t I? Smeg!”

He felt a hand on his shoulder and turned to see Rimmer. “You had a good innings,” he said. “I mean, three million and thirty-odd years, it’s not bad considering how badly you used to treat that body.”

“Not helping, Rimmer,” Lister told him.

“And look on the bright side,” Rimmer continued. “You’re already a hologram. You won’t have to go through any of the trauma _I_ went through, because you’ve already done it. You already had chance to ease yourself into it; get used to it. It’s like taking a test drive.”

Lister slumped. If he’d ever had a test drive like this, he definitely wouldn’t have bought the car. “Yeah,” he said. Rimmer was right. There were worse things. He couldn’t _think_ of any of them right now, but that was because he was in shock. He took a deep breath and steeled himself. “Come on then Kryten, give it to me straight. How long have I got?”

Flustered, Kryten looked around the room, at the two holograms and one cat staring at him. “No, sirs, you appear to have misunderstood. Mr Lister isn’t dying, he’s showing signs of recovery.”

Lister frowned. “But I asked if I was okay, and you told me I wasn’t.”

Kryten nodded. “Correct. Because you’re doing _better_ than okay. In fact, I believe it may be time for you to return to your body.”

Lister exhaled. “Kryten, you smeghead. I thought… It’s ready? You’re sure? It’s only been five months.”

Kryten frowned. “I’m sorry sir, were you hoping it would be longer?”

“No, of course not. It’s just, you _said_ it’d be longer. You said you didn’t know how long. I’m really not going to die?”

“Well, of course you are sir,” Kryten told him. “Eventually. But not yet.”

Lister took a deep breath and released it as a sigh of relief. “Thank smeg,” he said. “But it is sooner than you thought, isn’t it?”

“Not exactly, no,” Kryten told him. “That is to say yes, I did base my assumption on a longer recovery time, and frankly sir, I was planning for the worst; that was for you not to recover at all. But as it has been pointed out to me numerous times over recent months,” he glanced in Rimmer’s direction as he spoke, “I am simply an automated lavatory attendant, unfit to even administer a plaster on a graze, let alone long-term care.”

Lister turned wordlessly to Rimmer.

“In my defence, I was right,” Rimmer stammered. “Look, he got it totally wrong. Anyway, I was under a lot of stress at the time. We’d just escaped from a rogue simulant, you were unconscious and bleeding from a head wound, possibly dying, and the Cat was only making things worse by whining about a bit of blood on his suit.”

“Hey, don’t remind me,” Cat said. “The pain of that loss is still fresh.”

“It was almost a year ago, get over it.”

“Guys!” Lister yelled. Silence descended over the room. “Thank you. So, Kryten, you’re sure I’m healed?”

Kryten shook his head. “Not 100% certain sir, no. Until we actually give it a go, we’re not going to know for sure.”

“Wait,” Lister said. “So you’re saying that you think I could go down to the medical unit right now, and get back in my body? _Right now_?”

Kryten hesitated. “Well, technically yes. I would caution you however, after eleven months of inactivity, it will take some work to reach anything like the level of mobility that you’re used to.”

Cat grinned. “Eleven months of inactivity? That’s normal for this guy! He’s not even going to notice the difference.”

“Well then,” Rimmer said. He folded his arms. “It seems congratulations are in order. Now, if you’ll excuse me, gentlemen, I have things I need to be doing.” He walked, a little stiffly, out of the room.

Lister watched him go, half of him wanting to call him back, the other unable to think of any feasible excuse to do so.

“So,” said Kryten. “Would you like to transfer back now, or do you need additional time to process the news?”

“It’s really ready?” Lister asked again.

“I think so.”

“As in you’re not sure?”

“As in the medicomp seems to show enough improvement, that’s the best we can do. We’ll put you back and if you don’t wake up after a few hours, we’ll simply put you back into the hologram.”

Lister folded his arms.

“I do need to set your expectations however, sir. You are not going to wake up perfectly fine, leap out of bed and scoff down a vindaloo. There will be a significant period of recuperation and rehabilitation first.”

“So you’re saying start with a bhuna?”

“No sir, I mean...”

“Not a _korma_?”

“No, sir. I was using ‘consume a vindaloo’ as an example of everyday activity for you. What I mean is that it will take time before you can resume many normal activities. I’ve been following the medicomp’s instructions to the letter, but it warns that there will be significant muscle wastage. You will be very weak, and it will take time and effort to make a full recovery. It’s unlikely that you will be able to eat any curry at all for the first few weeks at least, but your tolerance for spicy food is unlikely to be affected.”

Lister nodded. “No curries,” he said. “Smeg.”

“I know sir,” said Kryten. “It’s a tragedy. On the bright side, you’re likely to be far too incapacitated to worry about it for a while. So, ready?”

Lister tapped his foot and glanced behind him, to the part of the room previously occupied by Rimmer. He couldn’t believe he wasn’t already racing down to the medical unit. He couldn’t believe he was delaying for any amount of time at all.

“Give me a bit of time, Kryten, okay? I need to make sure Rimmer’s okay.”

“Okay?” said Cat. “Of course he isn’t! Have you _met_ the guy?”

Lister rolled his eyes. “Yeah, I know. Still, I want to talk to him. Kryten, I’ll let you know when I’m ready. There’s no time limit on this, right?”

Kryten shook his head. “No, sir. I suppose not.”

“Great.” Lister headed for the door, then turned in the same direction that Rimmer had gone. “I’ll let you know when I’m ready.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ♥ ♥ Comments are loved ♥ ♥
> 
> Thank you to norwegianpornfaerie for the beta.


	15. Chapter 15

As Holly had promised, Lister found Rimmer in the Science Room. He was standing with his back to the door, staring intently into one of the scanners. Lister folded his arms and waited for Rimmer to notice him and turn around.

When he didn’t, Lister cleared his throat to tell Rimmer that he was there. Rimmer leaned a little further into the scanner, as though he had seen something fascinating in there. He showed no sign of turning around.

“Rimmer,” Lister said, eventually. “You okay?”

Rimmer still didn’t move. “Listy,” he said, still staring into the scanner. “Didn’t notice you there.”

That was a lie, Lister was almost certain of that. It didn’t matter. He walked quietly across the room and sat down in the chair right next to the scanner that Rimmer was using. “So, you okay?” he asked again.

“Fine, thank you. Tickety-boo.”

That told him everything he needed to know. “Rimmer, if you’re going to lie, at least make it believable,” he told him.

Even with half his face buried in the scanner, Lister could see Rimmer frown. “What are you talking about?”

“Tickety-boo,” Lister told him. “I know that’s what you say when you’re _not_ okay.”

“Right,” Rimmer said scornfully. “So you’ve got me all figured out, have you? You think I just say the opposite of what I mean. So what would you have assumed if I’d told you I _wasn’t_ okay? That everything was just hunky dory, I suppose?”

Lister rolled his eyes. “No. I didn’t mean that. What I meant is, you say stupid things like ‘tickety-boo’ and ‘hunky dory’. Like you think using made up words makes you more believable or something.”

Rimmer shook his head dismissively. “They’re not ‘made up words’, Lister. Well, no more than any other word is, anyway. And I _am_ fine. Why wouldn’t I be?”

Lister shrugged. “I dunno, call me crazy if you like, but there was just something about the way you charged out of our quarters as soon as Kryten said I could go back to my body that made me think that _maybe_ you weren’t feeling a hundred percent.”

Rimmer, frustratingly, continued to stare into the scanner. “Well I am,” he said. “A hundred and ten percent, actually. No… a hundred and _fifteen_. Now if you’ll excuse me, Lister, I’m very busy and you’re interrupting me.”

“Right,” said Lister, playing along. “So, what is it you’re busy doing, anyway?”

“I’m recalibrating the scanner,” Rimmer told him. “Remember I asked you to do it and you didn’t? I have to do everything myself around here.”

“Oh yeah,” Lister said. “You mean the time you suggested it, but then you told me not to do it because I’d need the skutters, and they didn’t respect me enough to do what I said.” He glanced around the room. “So, where _are_ the skutters, by the way?”

The tension in Rimmer’s stance increased noticeably. “They’ll be along shortly. I’m just doing some pre-checks first,” he said.

Lister nodded as though that was plausible. “Right, yeah. Makes sense,” he told him. “But why are you doing this _now_? How come you chose this particular moment to recalibrate the scanner?”

“Why _not_ now?” Rimmer countered. Lister could hear irritation in his voice now, as the lie began to fall apart. “Is there something wrong with this particular moment? Is there something else I should be doing?”

“No, but…” Lister sighed. “Rimmer, come on. Can you take your head out of that thing for a minute and look at me; talk to me?”

For a moment, he thought Rimmer was going to refuse. Then, slowly, Rimmer moved back from the scanner and turned to face him. “Fine,” he spat. “You know, I can talk to you perfectly well while I’m working. Why are you even here, anyway? Shouldn’t you be down in the medi-bay getting transferred back into your body?” There was an edge to his voice, a tone that would have told Lister, if he hadn’t already known, exactly what was bothering Rimmer.

Lister shrugged. “I will. There’s no rush. Kryten’s got to sort some stuff first anyway. That’s what’s bothering you though, isn’t it? You’re upset about that. What is it, you jealous?”

“Oh please.”

“So you’re saying you’re _not_ jealous?”

Rimmer gave him a contemptuous look. “Of _course_ I’m jealous,” he said. “Was there ever any doubt in your mind that I’d be jealous? You know it’s everything I ever wanted.” He looked away, down at his feet, and folded his arms. “I’m happy for you.”

“Yeah,” Lister said, “I can tell.”

“I suppose you think I’m lying about that too? Maybe you’re right, I’m not being very believable, am I? Maybe I should be dancing a jig when I say it.”

“No.” Lister shook his head. “I know you’re not lying. You’re _un_ happy for you though, right?”

“I’m fine,” Rimmer insisted. “Anyway, you should be going. You don’t want to keep doctor Bog-Bot waiting.”

Lister shrugged. “In a bit. I wanted to talk to you first.”

“And now you have.”

True. That wasn’t what he had meant though. “Yeah, I know. But I’m not done yet. And I was kinda hoping you might talk to me, too.”

Rimmer folded his arms. “There’s nothing to talk about,” he said.

Lister sighed. He folded his arms and glanced at his feet. “I want to say I’m sorry,” he told him.

Rimmer frowned. “You did this already, remember? We’d been drinking, you apologised for being such a smeghead when Holly first switched me on, I accepted…”

“You _provisionally_ accepted. And I never said I was a smeghead.”

Rimmer shrugged, “No, I know. _I_ said it.”

Lister smiled. He supposed that was fair. “Okay, fine. That’s not what I’m apologising for this time, anyway. You know, when I first woke up after the attack and you told me I was a hologram, my first thought was how you’d be looking forward to seeing me struggle with everything. I never thought you were serious about helping.” Okay, it hadn’t really been his first thought, but it had definitely been his second or third.

“Oh.” Rimmer looked away, embarrassed. “Actually, I _was_ looking forward to that,” he said. “A bit. I mean I genuinely did intend to help too, but you can’t blame me for wanting to see you suffer a bit first.”

Lister supposed that should bother him. Actually, it made him feel a bit better, like the universe made sense again. He smirked. “I guess I can’t. I should have trusted my instincts.”

“Yes, well, it turned out to be less fun than I’d imagined,” Rimmer added. He unfolded his arms, folded them again, and shuffled his feet nervously. “In fact, it was downright uncomfortable. Seeing you going through that, it brought everything back; all the things I couldn’t do anymore; everything I’d lost. Just when I was finally starting to think I’d come to terms with it.”

There was something almost accusatory in his tone, as though Lister had done it on purpose. At the same time, Lister thought that he sounded very sad. A sense of loss appeared to permeate his words, one that felt completely raw and new. Lister resisted the urge to reach out and touch Rimmer, to comfort him, he didn’t think it would help. Instead, he folded his arms even more tightly, and remained quiet, giving him the space to continue.

Rimmer hesitated, for a moment he looked at Lister as though he had expected some kind of interruption; as though he had planned for it and when it didn’t come, he didn’t know what to do. He floundered for a few seconds, then his expression hardened and he glared at Lister. “Why’d you have to go and get yourself hit in the head like that anyway? Couldn’t you have just been more alert, checked behind you once in a while? Why couldn’t you have had faster reflexes?”

Lister shrugged helplessly. There was no good answer to that.

On a roll now, Rimmer continued. “And I’m not too happy with Kryten either. This whole thing was mostly his idea, you know. I mean, sure Cat accidentally put the thought in his head but Kryten’s the one who actually suggested it. The stupid metal goit.”

That didn’t seem exactly fair.

“I was perfectly happy before all this happened, and now look at me! I’m sulking in the science room pretending to repair the scanner.”

Well, at least he admitted he wasn’t really fixing the scanner. Lister shook his head, “Rimmer, you weren’t perfectly happy before. I don’t think you’ve _ever_ been perfectly happy. Remember when you screwed up Better Than Life for all of us because your brain just couldn’t handle you being happy?”

Rimmer’s nostrils flared with irritation. “Fine. Maybe I wasn’t _happy_ , but I wasn’t miserable either. I was okay. I was getting on with it. I was _used_ to it. Then you came along being all touchy-feely, and…”

“Er… Touchy-feely?” Lister said.

“Yes. All touchy-feely, and now you’re going to go back to your body and I’m going to be left trapped as a hologram again.”

Lister sighed. “Yeah, I get it,” he said. What was worse was, he agreed. He had screwed up here. “You’re not going to be any worse off than you were before, though,” he said.

“I know. I _know_ that. It just _feels_ worse now. I’d forgotten what it was like to feel like a person.”

Lister folded his arms even tighter in an effort to stop himself from grabbing hold of Rimmer, whether it was to hug him or to shake some sense into him, Lister wasn’t sure. Either way, he didn’t think it would be appreciated right now.

“You _are_ a person, Rimmer,” he said. “You’ve always been a person to me.” He shrugged. “I mean, a really annoying person, but still, a person.”

Rimmer glared at him, but his expression quickly softened. “You mean that, don’t you?” he said.

“That you’re annoying?” Lister grinned and placed a hand on his heart. “Yes, I absolutely do.”

Rimmer shook his head in apparent irritation, but Lister could just about make out a hint of a smile, and he knew that while things were far from okay, they were at least better than they had been.

Lister sighed. “I’m sorry.”

“Again? What for this time?”

“Everything. This whole crappy situation. You’re right, it is my fault, and I wish there was something I could do to make it b…” he stopped.

He couldn’t. Could he?

Rimmer looked at him. “What?”

“I can’t believe I’m going to say this,” Lister said, “but what about, after I transfer back, when I’m all healed up and everything, we could… I mean you’d have to make some promises, and you’d have to mean them, but you could do that, right? Maybe? I mean, it’d be worth it, wouldn’t it?” He shrugged, “I dunno, what do you think?”

Rimmer was still looking at him, an expression of pure bafflement on his face. “Lister, I don’t know if you noticed, but you didn’t actually say anything there. What are you drivelling about?”

Hadn’t he? He was sure he had. “Swapping bodies,” he clarified. “On a very _very_ temporary basis. I’m talking like a day or two at the most, at first anyway. ‘Til we see if you can handle it without going insane this time. Then maybe we can talk about doing it for longer. No keep fit regime or anything like that, just you know, relax. Enjoy yourself.”

Rimmer briefly closed his eyes.

“Rimmer?”

Rimmer shook his head. “Not a good idea.”

Yeah, he was probably right. Just the thought of letting Rimmer loose in his body was terrifying. It evoked memories of the frustration of watching him gorge himself on every food available with Lister powerless to do anything but beg him to stop, and that terror of waking up to find that Rimmer had stolen his body again as he had slept. Worse still, had been the horror of the crash, and the certainty that Rimmer had killed himself, and Lister’s body along with him.

“See!” Rimmer said triumphantly. Lister pulled himself out of the bad memories to find Rimmer pointing at him animatedly with a victorious look on his face. “You don’t want to do it; you’re relieved I said no. It’s written all over your face!”

Lister shrugged. “Of course I don’t want to,” he said. “The last time we did it you nearly killed me, and then you thought it’d be funny to pretend I lost my arm in the crash. I had nightmares about that for… I _still_ have nightmares about it, Rimmer.”

Rimmer nodded slowly. “Then what are you offering for, you idiot? What would you have done if I’d said yes?”

“I was hoping you would,” Lister told him. “I mean, I kind of owe you. You’ve made this whole thing tolerable, Rimmer. And you’re right, now I’m just going to swan off back to my body, and it’s not fair.”

“Life’s not fair, Listy,” Rimmer told him. “That’s still as true today as it was when I learned it at three years old, now kindly smeg off before I change my mind and hold you to that offer.”

“Offer’s still open,” Lister told him.

Rimmer shook his head. He sat down and folded his arms. “Want to know something funny?”

Lister nodded.

“I never really liked being touched,” he said. “Before, I mean, when I was alive. Well, not _never_ , there were times…”

“Yvonne McGruder,” Lister said

“Among many, many others, but yes, that was one of the times that it was good. But other times. You know those casual touches; pats on the back, hugs, even handshakes, I always avoided them if I could.”

Lister nodded. He’d known Rimmer had never been the most tactile of people. “How come?” he asked.

“Self preservation, I suppose. You really had to watch your back at school, there could be literally a fraction of a second between some upperclassman giving you a friendly slap on the back, and him shoving your head down the nearest toilet and pulling the chain. All in good fun, of course. And of course if my brothers got hold of me during one of their -- our -- games… well I still have the scars from some of those encounters. Again, great fun of course, but it always felt safer to keep people at arm’s length.”

Apparently Rimmer’s idea of a funny story and Lister’s were very different. The more he heard about Rimmer’s childhood, the more the person that Rimmer had grown into made sense. “You know, Rimmer, you’re about the only person that’s ever made me grateful for my own childhood.”

Rimmer frowned. “Weren’t you abandoned under a pool table?”

“Yep, and thank smeg for that.”

“You misunderstand,” Rimmer insisted. “It was good; it was character building.”

“Yeah, well technically everything’s character building, isn’t it? That’s all anybody is, is the sum of their experiences, right? It just seems like the character that _your_ experiences built was… well, was…”

Rimmer’s nostrils flared. “Yes?”

“Doesn’t matter. What’s this about, Rimmer? Why are you telling me all this?”

Rimmer sighed. “Because these past few months, while I was making things ‘tolerable’ for you, I was realising, for the first time, that sometimes it’s not such a bad thing to be touched. Sometimes it’s even…” he shook his head. “I don’t want to have to give it up, Lister.”

Lister folded his arms. “What are you saying to me, Rimmer? You asking me to stay as a hologram?”

“No, of course not. I couldn’t ask you that. I just wish…” He broke off and shook his head. “I _told_ you this would happen. I _warned_ you. You insisted on us touching, and I knew it was a mistake. I knew I wouldn’t want to give it up, but you had to go and make your stupid poppadom speech, and convince me, and…”

“Samosas,” Lister said.

“What?”

“It was my stupid _samosa_ speech,” Lister clarified. “It’s the samosas we’ve run out of, I’ve got plenty of poppadoms.”

Rimmer rolled his eyes. “Oh, how _nice_ for you. So when you can go back into your body and leave me stuck here unable to touch anything again, you can enjoy a nice plate of vindaloo and poppadoms.”

“Rimmer…” Lister began, then stopped. He couldn’t think of a single thing to say.

Rimmer turned back to the scanner, as though he was done with the conversation. Before he could bury his attention back into it, Lister reached out a hand and touched him lightly on the arm. Rimmer flinched back as though he had been burned.

Lister pulled his hand back quickly. “Sorry,” he said.

Rimmer turned to face him again, eying him warily, arms folded defensively across his chest, as though he expected Lister to make another attempt. To reassure him, Lister took a step backward, putting a little distance between the two of them. “I won’t be able to have vindaloo for a while anyway,” he said. “Not according to Kryten.”

“What?” Rimmer looked at him with something approaching horror. “Surely you won’t have to switch to bhunas?”

Lister smiled, but shook his head. “Yeah, that’s what I said. But no, no curries at all, apparently. For a couple of weeks, anyway. Kryten reckons it’ll be a while ‘til I can do pretty much anything, and I guess tucking into tongue-meltingly spicy food comes way down the list, somewhere underneath working up the strength to sit up in bed.”

“Oh.” Rimmer winced sympathetically. “Right. I suppose that makes sense. Honestly, with you being here like this, it’s easy to forget how ill you’ve really been.”

“Yeah,” said Lister, “tell me about it.” He had a feeling he wasn’t going to know exactly how bad it really was until he was back in his own body and could experience it for himself. As much as he did want to go back, he wasn’t looking forward to that part at all. “You know, I don’t have to go back to my body right away,” he said. “Kryten says there’s no rush, it’ll wait.”

“Yes, but surely the longer you wait, the worse your condition will get and the harder it’s going to be to get yourself back into shape.”

Lister shrugged. “It’s been nearly a year, I don’t think another day or two’s going to make a huge difference.”

“Okay, no, probably not. But what would be the point?”

“Give you another day or two of being able to touch,” Lister said.

“And again, what would be the point? We’ll just end up doing this again in a couple more days, and then what? Are you going to delay it again?”

He shook his head. Probably not.

“Do me a favour, will you? If you see the skutters on your way down to the medi-bay, let them know I need them in here. I might as well get this scanner recalibrated since I’m here anyway.”

Lister sighed. “I’m going to miss it too, you know,” he said. “I mean, not like you will, I know it’s not the same, but you didn’t just make it tolerable, Rimmer. Some of it, I’ve even enjoyed.”

“Enjoyed?” Rimmer smirked and shook his head, “Oh yes, I’ve seen what a great time you’ve been having getting frustrated with the skutters for being useless and moping around in bed feeling depressed. Not to mention all the fun you have trying to pick things up and remembering you can’t -- I saw you do that again yesterday. Frustrating, isn’t it?”

He hadn’t realised that Rimmer had seen that. He wondered what else he had noticed. “Yeah,” he said quietly. “It’s a massive pain in the arse.”

“So, _not_ all that enjoyable, then?”

“Well, not that part, no. But other stuff.” Lister scratched absently at a piece of holographic dirt on his jacket. “I can hardly remember the last time I just, you know, hugged someone. I didn’t even realise I’d missed it. And falling asleep with someone else there, next to me. I thought it’d be weird, but it was actually great. You know you said you felt like a person again? I get that. I did too.”

“Apart, presumably, from the times when you woke up with half of your body embedded in the wall.” Rimmer said.

Lister laughed. “No, even then. Good thing nobody was in the quarters next door though. That would have given them the fright of their lives!”

Rimmer gave him a small, but genuine smile. “I never liked doing things like that,” he admitted.

“Things like what?”

“You know, walking through walls, putting a hand through something. Anything that reminds me I don’t have a body.”

Lister nodded. He got it. Honestly, he hadn’t liked it that much either, it had been weird and disconcerting. “Sorry. Didn’t bother you too much did it?” he asked. “Like you said, there wasn’t a lot of room in that bed.”

“Oh, no, it didn’t bother me at all,” Rimmer assured him. “It’s fine when it’s somebody else.”

Of course it was. Lister resisted the urge to roll his eyes.

“Anyway, you really should be going,” Rimmer told him.

He knew that, but for some reason he was finding it very difficult to actually turn around and go down to the medi-bay. “You sure you don’t want me to wait a couple of days?” he asked. “I never did give you that back massage I promised you. Last chance.”

“I…” Rimmer seemed to think about it for a moment, then he shook his head. “No.”

Lister nodded. He hadn’t really expected him to have changed his mind.

“But…” Slowly, Rimmer unfolded his arms and held out a hand to Lister. Remembering the way Rimmer had flinched back the last time he had touched him, Lister hesitated for a moment, then took a step forward and took Rimmer’s hand in his.

He had been expecting a handshake. Instead, Rimmer simply held onto him with a gentle, almost careful, firmness that reminded Lister of the first time they had touched. Rimmer’s gaze was completely focussed on their hands, as though he was trying to cement it in his memory.

When he was finished. He took a step closer, closing the distance between them to a point that would have felt uncomfortable once. Now, it felt right. He placed his arms around Lister and they hugged tightly. “Don’t get the wrong idea,” he said quietly into Lister’s ear.

“About what?”

Rimmer moved back just slightly and turned his head so that he faced Lister directly. He closed his eyes as he leaned in and kissed him.

It was nothing like the last time. The last time, they had both been drunk, and the chaste, dry brush of Rimmer’s lips against his own had lasted less than a second before Rimmer had come to his senses, realised what he was doing and stopped. This time, they were completely sober, this time it was completely intentional, and this time, Rimmer didn’t hold back.

When he finally pulled away, they were both breathless. Lister saw an unfamiliar embarrassed blush colour Rimmer’s cheeks. “Sorry,” Rimmer told him. “I had to do it, like you said, it was my last chance.”

Lister stared at him, speechless for a full thirty seconds before he could bring himself to respond. “You smeghead!” he said.

Rimmer frowned. “Eh?”

“You waited until now? You couldn’t have done this months ago? The first time you kissed me? One of the times we were in _bed_ together? You had to wait until five minutes before I’m supposed to go back to my body to…?”

Rimmer shrugged, embarrassed. “I wanted to, but I didn’t know how you’d react. Then when I realised I wasn’t going to get another opportunity…” He shook his head. “Like I said, sorry.”

Lister closed his eyes. He didn’t know what to do. “What did you mean ‘don’t get the wrong idea’? What idea should I get?” People, in Lister’s experience at least, didn’t kiss like that if they didn’t mean it.

“You shouldn’t get any ideas at all,” Rimmer told him. “I was just… curious. That’s all.”

“And now what?”

Rimmer looked like he didn’t know what to do with his face. His expression morphed from a frown to an embarrassed smile, back to a frown again. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, and finally shook his head. “And now I know,” he said.

Arms folded, Lister looked at him appraisingly. “So that’s it, is it? Curiosity satisfied, let’s just forget about it and move on?”

“Er…” said Rimmer. “Yes.”

Lister sighed. “You sure, because I really don’t mind…”

“Sure,” Rimmer said quickly, before Lister could finish the thought. “Absolutely one hundred percent certain.”

“Oh.” Lister shrugged, feeling a little insulted. “A hundred percent, eh? Right.”

Rimmer blushed a little harder. “Maybe closer to ninety… maybe eighty-five”

“Well, that gives me ten or fifteen percent,” Lister said. “I can work with that.”

Rimmer shook his head. “No you can’t. That’s enough stalling, Lister, it’s time for you to go.”

Lister stared at him baffled. “Stalling? Rimmer, you just kissed me. If anyone’s stalling here it’s you.”

Rimmer shrugged. “Well, it’s time for me to stop. Come on, I’ll go down to the medi-bay with you. I have a feeling you’re never going to go if somebody doesn’t escort you.”

“Hang on a minute.”

“No,” Rimmer told him. “I’m serious about this, Lister.” He placed a hand on each of Lister’s shoulders and began to guide him firmly out of the room and toward the lift.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments are loved and cherished ♥
> 
> Thank you Norwegianpornfaerie on tumblr for the beta


	16. Chapter 16

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Before you read this one, just go back and make sure you saw the chapter before. AO3 messed up somehow and didn't move the fic to the top of the page, so I'm not sure everyone noticed chapter 15 when I posted it, and it's a pretty important one.

Lister rested his chin in his cupped hand, propped up by an elbow on the arm of the wheelchair as Kryten pushed him through the corridors of Red Dwarf. He came to a stop outside the entrance to the quarters that Lister shared with Rimmer, and the door opened.

“Okay, thanks Krytes, I can take it from here,” Lister told him.

Kryten shook his head. “Nonsense, sir,” he insisted. “It’s no bother at all, I’ve brought you this far, I’m going to make sure that you get safely from the door to the bed.”

Lister sighed. He knew from past experience that there was little point arguing with Kryten when he was in nursemaid mode. Instead, he sat passively as the mechanoid manoeuvred the wheelchair through the door.

“There we go, sir,” Kryten said. “Home safe and sound. Now, how about we get you tucked up into bed?”

“Really, Kryten. I can do this bit myself,” Lister said.

“Of course you can, sir,” Kryten told him. “But you’ve had a very busy day. Your first time outside of the medi-bay in three weeks, I imagine it’s all a bit overwhelming for you. Now, You just relax, and I’ll pop you in bed.”

Lister cringed and gave Rimmer, standing in the corner of the room with arms folded, an embarrassed glance as Kryten bent over and picked him up out of the wheelchair.

“Be careful with him!” Rimmer said. He approached, nervously, arms outstretched as though he could catch Lister if Kryten were to drop him.

Kryten carefully deposited Lister on Rimmer’s bunk, placing him with his back resting against the far too many pillows that had been arranged there. He pulled the cover over him, and proceeded to tuck him in.

“Now then, how about a nice cup of tea?” Kryten asked him. “And maybe some of those bickies you like? Or better yet, a nice mug of warm milk to help you get off to sleep.”

Lister shook his head. “I don’t like warm milk, Kryten. I told you, it’s disgusting. Tastes too much like milk. And that weird horrible skin it gets on the top sometimes?” He shuddered.

“Tea, then,” Kryten said.

“I’m fine, really.”

“A glass of water, then. Don’t forget, now you’re back in your own quarters, I’m not going to be here all the time. I’d hate for you to wake up thirsty in the middle of the night and not be able to get yourself a drink. I’ll get one for you now, just in case.” He turned to leave, then hesitated. “Unless, of course, you’d rather I stayed the night. It’s really no problem.”

Rimmer took a step forward. “Er, yes it would be, actually. It would be a problem for _me_.”

Kryten appeared unconcerned. “Yes sir, but surely you must agree that as a human, Mr Lister’s needs come above your own.”

Rimmer glared hard at Kryten. “I agree no such thing,” he said. “Now kindly smeg off before I order you to microwave your head.”

“I…” Kryten said. He straightened up, then turned back to Lister. “I’ll get that water.”

“I don’t want any water, Kryten,” Lister told him. “I’m fine, honestly. I just want to get my head down.”

Kryten hesitated. “I’ll come back in an hour or so,” he said. “Just in case you’ve changed your mind.”

Lister sighed, but didn’t bother to argue. He knew there was no point. As Kryten left the room and the door closed behind him, Lister relaxed. He untucked the sheets and threw three excess pillows onto the floor next to the bunk, then he turned to Rimmer. “Microwave his head?” he asked.

Rimmer shrugged. “It was the best I could come up with on the spot.”

“It worked.” Lister shuffled a little further down the bunk and rested his head on the remaining pillow. “Thanks for swapping beds with me,” he said.

“Well, I could hardly leave you at Kryten’s mercy in the medi-bay until you had enough strength to climb a ladder, could I? I think that would constitute cruel and unusual treatment.”

Lister laughed. “He’s not that bad really,” he said. “He’s just…” he hesitated. “Okay, he is that bad. It was alright when I was still ill, but now I’m getting better, yeah. Except for the exercises the medi-comp set for me, he literally won’t let me do anything for myself. Too much longer and I think I’d have gone insane.”

“I’d have thought you’d be used to not doing things for yourself, after five months as a hologram.”

Lister looked at him. “That’s different.”

Rimmer nodded. “Maybe. I wouldn’t know. How are you adjusting, anyway?”

He hesitated, not sure how to answer that. Part of him wanted to talk about how he sometimes had trouble getting to sleep because he kept noticing the way the sheets and blankets felt against his skin, or how the first time Kryten had left him alone and he had had the strength to get out of bed himself, he had touched everything. He had savoured the feeling of the cold floor on his bare feet, and ran his hands over everything, feeling the difference between hard and soft, rough and smooth, cool and warm. Part of him wanted to tell Rimmer how much he had missed him, even when he was in the room with him. Even now, when they were so close that they could almost touch.

If anything, that made it worse.

“Lister?” Rimmer asked.

Lister blinked. “Uh, yeah. Fine,” he said.

Rimmer nodded. He sat down at the table, then stood up, paced the room, then sat down again. “What’s it like?” he asked.

“Honestly?” Lister shrugged. “I dunno. Right now, it kinda sucks. Kryten’s still not let me have a curry, can you believe it? Or a lager. Ask me again when I’m back on my feet properly.” 

“But everything else though,” Rimmer said. “To have a physical presence again…” he tailed off, hands clenched as though he was imagining grabbing something that his hand did not pass through.

Lister sighed. “Come on, Rimmer, Don’t do that to yourself, man,” he said, warningly. “You don’t want to listen to me bang on about how great it is to be able to pick things up. It’s not that great anyway. It’s totally overrated.”

Rimmer folded his arms and looked away. “Really?”

“Yeah, definitely,” Lister lied, knowing full well that Rimmer didn’t believe him.

“Well… good.” Rimmer said. “I suppose I’d better get to sleep, anyway, if that metal moron’s going to come blundering in checking if you need a drink of water all through the night.”

Awkwardly, without the ability to touch the ladder or the bunk with his hands, Rimmer managed to balance well enough to climb up to the bunk. Lister didn’t watch. He had managed it himself, but there had been more than one reason he had enjoyed sharing the bottom bunk with Rimmer when he had been a hologram.

“This won’t be for long,” he promised. “Soon as I’m strong enough to get up and down the ladder without falling, we’ll swap back.”

“It’s fine,” Rimmer said, sounding a little breathless from the exertion. I’m figuring it out. If _you_ managed it, I certainly can.”

Lister rolled his eyes.

“incidentally, any idea when that will be?” Rimmer asked. “If it’s going to be too long, we’ll get all these posters moved. It looks a real mess up here, Lister.”

Lister shrugged. “Dunno. Right now I’m exhausted from a short walk on the treadmill and lifting a couple of weights. I mean, I finally convinced Kryten to let me cut up my own food, but that’s not too strenuous. Other than that, all I’ve done today is sit around in bed, sit around in a chair, and sit around in a wheelchair while Kryten pushed me around the ship, and I’m _still_ wiped out. I feel like I’ve spent the day in the gym.”

“And how would you know?”

“Hey! I’ve been to the gym before!”

“Yes, but while _at_ the gym, have you ever done anything other than sit in the jacuzzi enjoying the bubbles?”

Lister grinned. “Yes,” he said. “Once. Ended up feeling exactly like I do now, that’s why I never did it again.”

He rolled over onto his side and closed his eyes, feeling the cool of a fresh bit of pillow against his cheek and the soft sensation of the freshly laundered cotton sheets against his skin. He touched the bed with his hand, caressing it in slow circles, savouring the sensation.

Something told him that sleep wasn’t going to come as easily as he had hoped.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments and kudos are loved


	17. Chapter 17

“Hey bud, how’s it going?” Cat asked as he slinked into the room.

Lister looked up from his meal and shrugged. “Not bad, man. Not bad at all. Kryten reckons I’m nearly back to full health. I walked half a mile today.”

“Half a mile?” Cat said. He pulled out a chair and sat down at the table opposite Lister. “Is that a lot?”

Lister shrugged. “It depends on your perspective, I guess. I mean, to a guy that can run a marathon, no, probably not, but to a guy that was comatose not too long ago, I’d say it’s a pretty impressive achievement. I mean, I was shagged out by the end of it, and I’m going to be feeling it tomorrow for sure, but I did it. And even better…” he held up a piece of garlic naan dripping with vindaloo, “Kryten’s cleared me to eat the spicy stuff again.”

Cat screwed up his nose in distaste. “Hey, so that’s what stinks. You need to _warn_ me before you heat up one of those things!”

Lister sniffed the plate of curry. It smelled beautiful. His mouth was watering already. He had been waiting for this for months. “Oh, and I moved back into the top bunk,” he added. “I’ve built up enough strength to reliably climb a ladder. It’s the little things, you know?”

“Yeah yeah, I don’t care about that,” Cat told him. “I was just trying to start a conversation, so it wouldn’t seem so sudden when I laid into you about Goalpost Head.”

“Rimmer?” Lister crammed the piece of naan bread into his mouth. Immediately his mouth began to burn. He sucked in a sharp intake of breath in an attempt to cool down. “What about him?” he asked around the food, and took a large swig of water.

“Water?” Cat asked. “You feeling okay?”

“I’ve been cleared for curry, but alcohol’s still off limits,” Lister explained. “What about Rimmer?”

* * *

“He’s been in a bad mood for weeks!” Cat said. “It’s your fault, you know.”

Lister took another large gulp of water and held it in his mouth before he swallowed it, in a futile effort to cool down the burning in his mouth. He knew it wouldn’t work, but it provided some temporary relief. The curry seemed a lot spicier than it should. If eleven months in a coma plus recovery time had ruined the spice tolerance he had spent twenty eight years building up, he was going to be very, very unhappy.

Maybe it was just a particularly spicy vindaloo. That happened sometimes, you just got one where the chef’s hand and slipped when he added the chillies. He took another gulp of water, and noticed that Cat was still staring at him, waiting for an answer. “What do you mean?” he asked. “How’s it _my_ fault?”

“You’re kidding, right?” Cat asked incredulously. 

Lister shook his head. He glanced over at the little fridge they had in their room. He knew for a fact that he had some lager in there, because he had checked earlier that day. “He seemed fine this morning,” he said.

“Yeah, well he would, wouldn’t he? With _you_. You’re best buds now, apparently.”

“What?” Lister speared a piece of chicken with his fork, scooped up enough rice to counter a little of the spiciness, and popped it into his mouth. “Cat, what are you on about?”

“Come on, it’s obvious,” Cat told him. “Ever since you lost your ‘H’ and moved back into your body, he’s been in a bad mood, and it’s only getting worse.”

Lister frowned. He’d _expected_ Rimmer to be in a bad mood, honestly, and he’d been pleasantly surprised at how well he had handled it. “What do you mean? What’s he been doing?” he asked.

“You know, Rimmer things,” Cat told him. “Just now, he tried to make me move my suits. Said they were a fire hazard. They’re just hanging in my wardrobe where I’ve always kept them.”

Lister nodded. “Where’s your wardrobe?” he asked.

“Like I’m going to tell you,” Cat said. “Not after what happened when he found out. Fire hazard! I mean, my fashion sense _is_ on fire, but not like that!”

“I’m trying to help you,” Lister told him. “Where have you been keeping them?”

He watched Cat consider his options, then shrug. “Fine. They’re near the fire escape,” Cat told him. “You know that huge room on B deck with the fire alarm and all the fire extinguishers?”

Lister nodded.

“That’s my wardrobe. I use the fire extinguishers to hang my ties on.”

“Right,” Lister said. He ripped off another piece of bread, and used it to scoop up more curry. “I mean, you can kinda see Rimmer’s point.”

Cat stared at him with a look of pure betrayal on his face. “You’ve changed, bud,” he said.

“Hey! No I haven’t!” Lister told him. “I’m the same old Lister I’ve always been.”

“Nuh-uh,” Cat told him. “Being a hologram changed you. Anyway, he told me that if I didn’t move them, he was going to make the skutters throw them all out the airlock! Can you imagine? What kind of a monster would do something like that? My suits are innocent! They never did anything to him!”

“Alright,” Lister said. “That’s not on, you’re right. So what did you do? Did you move them?”

Cat shook his head. “No way. Don’t you know how many suits I have? It’d take me a _week_ to move all of them.” He grinned. “I outsmarted him. I locked the door. I’d like to see him try to throw them away now!”

Lister nodded. He could already see a fatal flaw in that plan. Namely that the door didn’t lock with a key, all Cat could have done was ask Holly to lock the door, and even if Holly wanted to take Cat’s side in this argument, there was a good chance that she would forget and let Rimmer in if he asked.

He decided to wait until later to share that piece of information, there was more that he needed to know first. “Smart,” he said “So what else has Rimmer been doing?”

“Oh, just generally trying to make my life a misery,” Cat told him. “I never heard so many Space Corps directives. And you know what else? He tried to make me _work_!”

Lister frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Well I was minding my own business, eating some Crispees, and he keeps asking me to push buttons for him. And I did, for a bit. I mean, I made him wait ‘til I was good and ready, but I pushed them eventually, you know. And then out of nowhere the dude asks… no, not asks, the dude straight up _tells_ me to go find Kryten so he can push the buttons instead! Seriously? Like I’m some kind of a dog that’s going to go fetch people for him! And when I said no, he got mad. Called me a useless moggy. A moggy! I don’t even know what that means.”

“It means ‘cat’,” Lister told him as he braced himself and shovelled in another forkful of curry.

Cat frowned. “Oh. Well, it was the _way_ he said it, you know?”

Lister nodded. The curry was making him start to sweat. He drew the sleeve of his shirt across his brow to dry it, then ripped off another piece of naan. “You know, maybe you’re right,” he said.

“Of _course_ I’m right?” Cat told him. “What am I right about?”

“Rimmer. Maybe it _is_ my fault. He _has_ been nicer to me than normal. Like, he never complained once when we had to switch bunks because I couldn’t climb up, even though he found it difficult to climb the ladder. And when I played my guitar the other day, he didn’t complain then either, he just got up and left.”

“That just proves he’s not a total idiot,” Cat said. “Anyone would leave when you’re playing your guitar.”

Lister shrugged. “But he normally shouts at me first, threatens to destroy it, tells me he’s going to have the skutters cut all the strings. That kinda thing. He just got up and left. Didn’t even wince like I was hurting him.” And now he came to think about it, Rimmer hadn’t complained about his snoring in… Actually, he wasn’t sure how long it had been.

“So?”

“So maybe if he’s not insulting me and threatening to throw my guitar out the airlock, he’s got to do it to someone else.”

“But he didn’t threaten to throw my guitar out the airlock,” Cat said. “I don’t even _have_ a guitar.”

Lister shook his head. His mouth was on fire now. He got up, grabbed a lager from the fridge and opened it. What Kryten didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. “I know you don’t have a guitar, but you _do_ have a room full of suits,” Lister explained. “I mean, he’s a smeghead, right? Maybe he just has to let the smeg out somehow.”

“Yeah, well I’d rather if it wasn’t all over me, thank you very much. Maybe now you’re better he can start hating on you again.”

“I’ll have a word with him,” Lister promised. “I’d maybe think about moving your suits though. If Rimmer wants to get in there, he can probably just ask Holly to unlock the door.”

Cat’s eyes widened in panic. “Seriously?”

Lister nodded.

“Gotta go,” Cat said, and bolted from the room.

Lister sighed. He dunked his naan in curry sauce again, and washed the mouthful down with a gulp of illicit lager. It was no longer too hot, his tolerance for spicy food was unaffected. He relaxed.

Rimmer was a problem though, Cat's theory might be partially right, but he was fairly sure that something else was bothering Rimmer too, and it was something that he couldn’t fix quite as easily.


	18. Chapter 18

The bed in the medi-bay was as hard and uncomfortable as Lister remembered. He wriggled around a little, trying to find a position that wasn’t going to leave him with bruised, aching muscles after a couple of days of inactivity.

“Ah!” said Kryten. “Here it is.” He was standing with his back to Lister as he riffled through a storage unit at the side of the room. Lister moved his head to one side in an attempt to see what it was that Kryten had found, but without getting off the bed it was impossible. He didn’t bother. Instead, he waited, drumming his fingers nervously on the surface of the bed and quietly humming a tune.

When Kryten turned around, he was brandishing a very large syringe filled with clear fluid. Lister stared at it, and felt his mouth go dry. “I’d forgotten about this part,” he said.

Kryten held the syringe so that the long needle pointed upward, and tapped on it a few times to coax any air bubbles to the surface, then depressed the plunger to expel the air, along with a large drop of the… stuff. The mind enema, Kryten had called it, the first time they had tried this.

“You didn’t seem to mind last time,” Kryten told him.

Lister licked his lips and very deliberately _didn’t_ look at the drop of liquid rolling down the very long, very sharp needle. “Last time I was comatose, Kryten.”

“Oh, yes of course. The time before that, then,” Kryten tried.

“The time before that I’d been chloroformed. By you. It was when Rimmer ordered you to knock me out and help him steal my body, remember?”

“Oh,” said Kryten. “Right. Which frankly, makes me wonder why you’re doing this. With all due respect sir, have you taken leave of your senses?”

Lister shook his head. Not looking at the needle made it seem bigger, somehow, as though it was magnified by his imagination, so he looked at it again. To his horror, he discovered that no, actually, he had been remembering it right. In fact, if anything, it looked bigger now. He didn’t look away; he felt more comfortable when he could keep an eye on it. “Does the needle _have_ to be that big?” he asked.

“Well, yes sir,” Kryten told him, surprised. “It needs to be long enough to penetrate right to the brain. We’ve got to _really_ stab it in there, pierce right through the temple to the soft tissue beyond.”

He sounded disturbingly cheerful about the whole thing, and Lister felt vaguely sick. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

“Now…” said Kryten, “Before I stab you in the head, I just want to make sure you’re absolutely certain about this. You’re not… under any duress, are you?”

“Duress?”

“Yes. I mean, Mr Rimmer isn’t… you did tell me that once you were healed I was never to use this technology on you again.”

Lister nodded. He remembered saying that. It had been his first day as a hologram, and he had already been desperate to get back into his body. Now look at him. It was strange how quickly things changed. “I said never without my permission, Kryten,” he clarified. “You _have_ my permission. If you didn’t, would I be laying on a bed waiting for you to inject me in the head?”

“You could be testing me,” Kryten suggested.

Lister sighed. “I’m not.”

“So you _really_ want me to do this?”

Lister closed his eyes. This was proving to be a lot more difficult than he had expected. It was one thing to come up with the idea and ask Kryten to do it, it was another entirely to have to face a barrage of questions from a mechanoid brandishing a giant syringe, and still stick to the plan. He was beginning to feel relieved that he hadn’t told Rimmer about this in advance. It meant that he could still back out if he needed to.

“I mean,” Kryten continued, “it is a very unusual request, and frankly, given your recent head injury, it is very worrying.”

“What? Why’s it worrying?” asked Lister. “You’re not saying it’s dangerous are you?” He wasn’t doing it if it was dangerous.

“Oh, no sir,” Kryten promised. “The procedure itself is quite safe. What worries me is the possibility that your head injury caused damage that we weren’t aware of; something resulting in you experiencing sympathy for Mr Rimmer.”

Lister sighed. If only there was some way to do this without Kryten’s help. Unfortunately, it would have been impossible to do it himself, and there was no way he was going to trust the Cat with safely transferring his mind from one place to the other. There was no way he would trust the Cat with transferring _anything_ from one place to another.

“Or if not a brain injury, perhaps some variation on Stockholm Syndrome,” Kryten continued. “Of course I’m not implying that Mr Rimmer kidnapped you, but the effect may have been similar. I imagine the enforced time seeing the universe through his eyes, as it were, may have had unexpected consequences.”

“What are you saying?” Lister asked.

Kryten shrugged his shoulders. “Perhaps nothing, sir, but perhaps that the trauma of your time as a hologram has damaged you psychologically to the point where you empathise with Mr Rimmer.”

Lister shook his head.

“See? This time last year a statement like that would have revolted and horrified you. Now, you’re still laying there waiting for me to inject you in the head. And I used the biggest needle I could find, too!”

“Kryten, what’s made me sympathise with Rimmer is you, downloading my brain into a hologram and leaving me to it for six months. Anyway, I’m not doing this for Rimmer. Not totally, anyway.”

“You’re… not? Then I’m _completely_ confused. I was working on the assumption that you were doing this because you decided you _liked_ Mr Rimmer.”

Lister shook his head. Oh God, he hoped Kryten didn’t mention that to Rimmer; he’d never hear the end of it. “It’s not like that. It’s…” he hesitated, trying to work out how to explain what he wanted to say. “Okay, so, you won’t judge me, right?”

Kryten hesitated. “Without knowing what you’re going to say sir, I can’t make that promise. I can, however, promise to _pretend_ that I’m not judging you, whether or not I actually am.”

“Fine.” Lister sighed. It would have to do. “While I was in a coma, while I was a hologram, I… touched Rimmer.”

“That’s all?” Kryten said with obvious relief. “I mean, it’s a little distasteful, but hardly the end of the world.”

“No, I mean I…” Lister shook his head. Kryten didn’t need all the details. “I mean, I touched Rimmer, and I liked it.”

Kryten’s expression morphed into something close to disgust. “Oh, sir! You are _sick_!”

“Hey! You said you’d pretend not to judge me.”

“I…” Kryten hesitated. “I’m sorry, you’re absolutely right. Enjoyed touching Mr Rimmer, you say? Well that’s completely f… Completely fiiiiii… fiiiiinnnnn…” He shook his head. “I’m sorry sir, I can’t do it. I thought I could, but I just can’t.”

Lister sighed. “We didn’t, like… there was no…” he lowered his voice to barely audible levels, “ _sex_ or anything. It was just, like physical contact. Hugs and… ” he broke off and shook his head, probably best not to mention sleeping in the same bed, or the kiss. “Look, people need to be touched, okay? And I hadn’t been for a long time.”

Kryten put the syringe down in a metal tray. “That’s simply not true,” he said. “I touch you all the time.”

“Kryten, hoovering me down when I drop crumbs down my shirt isn’t the same thing. Anyway it didn’t even matter that it was _Rimmer_ , that’s how much I needed it.”

“You _must_ have been desperate.”

Lister shrugged. “Yeah, I guess I was. And now I’m me again, I miss it, you know? Plus, Rimmer’s been in a bad mood for months now. I didn’t notice at first, I guess I was too focussed on recovering, but Cat pointed it out to me a couple of weeks ago and he’s right. You have to have noticed.”

“Of course. He’s been at least 52% more petty and 67% more irritable, and yes, it definitely is getting worse. He’s been the hologramatic equivalent of a moody teenager who someone told to stop being so moody.”

“Yeah, tell me about it. And did you know he’s started revising again?”

Kryten frowned. “Revising?”

“For the astronavigation exam. That’s the thing with Rimmer, when he’s feeling unhappy he never just sits around feeling sorry for himself like a normal person, he has to throw himself into some stupid task, like alphabetising our quarters, or learning Esperanto. Or in this case, passing the astronavs.”

“But Mr Rimmer _can’t_ pass the astronavigation exam,” Kryten said. “If he could, surely he would have done it one of the other nine times that he tried. The only thing that can possibly happen if he does this, is that he’ll fail and end up in an even worse mood than he already is.”

Lister nodded. “Exactly. So if he’s doing the exam again because he’s unhappy, what we need to do is find what’s making him unhappy, and fix it. Right?”

“It stands to reason sir, yes.”

“So, if _I’m_ missing being touched and I’ve got a physical body, imagine how _he_ feels. He’s been a hologram for years, all of a sudden he could touch again. I mean, he could only touch me, but it’s something, right? Then I go back to my body and he’s back to square one.”

“I see,” said Kryten.

“So I figured maybe this would help both of us. If I can do this a couple of days every few months or so, it’d be good for both of us, and as an added bonus, maybe we can stop Rimmer from driving us all crazy.”

Kryten considered it. “So, if I’m understanding you correctly,” he said. “You believe that the only reason Mr Rimmer has been making us all miserable, is that he needs a hug.”

Lister shrugged. “Basically, yeah.”

“And extrapolating from what you said about your own experiences, the only reason he needs a hug is because you hugged him in the first place, and inadvertently reminded him that he enjoys physical contact.”

“Uh…” Lister shrugged again, “Yeah, I suppose.”

Kryten picked up the syringe again. “In that case, sir, I withdraw my objection. I’m more than happy to stick a needle into your head.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thankyou to @norwegianpornfaerie over on tumblr for the beta


	19. Chapter 19

Lister waved a hand over the sensor by the door, and it slid open. Rimmer didn’t seem to have moved since earlier that afternoon when Lister had left. He was still sitting at the desk, positioned to give himself a good view of the room’s display monitor. He sat leaning forward in his chair, gaze fixated on the screen, which displayed black text on a white background. It looked like a scan of a study textbook, which made sense actually, since that was exactly what it was.

The desk in front of Rimmer was empty. When he had used to study, when he had been alive, his desk had been filled with study paraphernalia. There had been brand new pens, pencils, and highlighters lined up like soldiers standing to attention, there had been notepads purchased from the onboard shop, titled with study topics in Rimmer’s beautiful calligraphy, but completely empty of notes. Later, as the exam approached, learning drugs and other illegal study aids might appear.

Now, Rimmer couldn’t study that way anymore, and there was nothing but an empty desk. Rimmer stared at the screen with a glazed look in his eye, lips moving silently as he read the words on the page under his breath.

Quietly, Lister moved behind him and looked at the screen over his shoulder. It was about as interesting as he had expected, which was to say, not at all. “Good book?” he asked.

Rimmer flinched in surprise. He turned to shoot an irritated look at Lister before returning his attention to the screen. “Whatever it is you want, Lister, bother me with it another time. I’m busy.” He sighed. “Oh great. Now you’ve made me lose my place.”

Lister shrugged. It wasn’t a particularly long page, it didn’t look like it would be too much effort to find it again. “Can we talk about something?” he asked

Rimmer turned to glance at him again. His eyes narrowed in suspicion. “Talk about what?” he asked.

Lister didn’t say anything. Instead, he folded his arms and waited for Rimmer to notice the ‘H’ on his forehead that definitely hadn’t been there earlier that day.

“Lister, what?” Rimmer asked him, clearly exasperated. “And _must_ you stand right there? You know I don’t like people lurking behind me.”

“I’m not lurking,” Lister told him. He took a step to the left, placing himself no longer directly behind Rimmer, and continued to wait. Rimmer continued to be oblivious.

After a moment, Rimmer gave an exasperated shake of his head, and turned back to the screen. He raised a finger into the air in front of his face and began to move it slowly from left to right as he scoured the page for his place. “I don’t remember _any_ of this,” he said. “Holly, did you turn the page without me telling you to?”

The page disappeared completely, and Holly appeared on the screen instead. She shook her head from side to side. “No, ‘course not. You’ve been staring at that same page for half an hour, how do you not remember any of it?”

“Holly, go away!” Rimmer told her. He waved his arms in a ‘shoo’ motion. “How am I supposed to study when you keep appearing like that?”

“You did ask a question,” Lister said. “What did you expect?”

“And you can smeg off too,” Rimmer told him. “This is hard enough as it is, and you’re _really_ not helping. What’s next, Cat turning up? Kryten deciding it’s the perfect time to polish the furniture?”

Lister sighed. This was getting nowhere. “Did you notice anything different about me?” he tried.

With Holly gone, the screen once again displayed the text book, and Rimmer continued to point with one finger, not taking his eye off of whichever word he was up to. “Yes,” he said. “Now that you mention it, I do. Did you finally have your annual bath? I know you missed it while you were in your coma.”

Lister rolled his eyes. “No, smeghead. I’m…” He shook his head. Sometimes it was better to show than to tell. He reached across to tap Rimmer on the shoulder, then hesitated. Rimmer didn’t do well with unexpected physical contact, and the last thing he wanted was for him to run off again.

At the sudden pause in conversation, Rimmer’s pointing finger dropped from the screen, and he turned to see what was happening. His gaze immediately fell on Lister’s hand hovering awkwardly in the air a few inches from Rimmer’s shoulder. He frowned in confusion. “Er, Lister? What are you doing?”

“Nothing.” Lister grinned nervously and allowed his hand to drop to his side. “I mean, I _was_ going to tap you on the shoulder,” he admitted, “but I changed my mind.”

Rimmer frowned. His eyes moved from Lister’s hand to his face. His gaze settled just above eye level, and his eyes widened in surprise as he finally saw it, and realised what was going on.

Lister folded his arms. “You’re not the most observant of people, are you Rimmer?” he said. “How many times did you look at me before it finally clicked?”

Rimmer didn’t reply. Instead, he continued to stare at Lister’s forehead with a shocked expression on his face. His mouth moved silently, not forming any words, as though he was trying to think of something to say.

Lister spread his arms a little awkwardly and grinned nervously. “Surprise…”

“You…” Rimmer said. He continued to stare with an expression of confusion and shock. “You’re…” he tried again.

Lister shrugged and nodded. “Yeah.”

Without taking his eyes off Lister, Rimmer got to his feet. He reached out a hand, moving slowly and hesitantly, as though he didn’t quite trust what he was seeing, like he thought it could be some kind of a prank and he didn’t want to make a fool of himself. He jabbed a finger into Lister’s chest, then recoiled in shock the moment he made contact. “What happened?” he asked. Suddenly, his eyes were wide with concern.

Lister frowned. “What?”

“What do you mean ‘what’? What _happened_? Was it something to do with the head injury? Did you have another seizure? What did the medi-comp say?”

Oh. Oh no. Lister shook his head quickly as he tried to find the words to explain that Rimmer had misunderstood, that Lister had decided to do this for himself, that nothing bad had happened. “No, I…” he began.

“Are you… Is your body still alive? Or…?” the question trailed off into silence, as though he couldn’t bring himself to say it.

At that last question, Lister immediately stopped shaking his head and nodded instead. “Yes,” he said quickly. “It’s… I’m still… I’m fine. Relax, Rimmer, nothing happened. I just asked Kryten to put me back into a hologram for a couple of days, that’s all.”

Rimmer’s concern turned back into confusion. “What?”

“My body’s down in the medi-bay. Kryten’s going to keep an eye on it for me, but he says it’ll be fine for a couple of days if he just puts it on a drip and makes sure it gets fluids.”

“Wait?” Rimmer said. “You mean to tell me you did this on _purpose_?”

“Well…” Lister shrugged, “yeah.”

“Right.” Rimmer shook his head. “So, do you want to tell me what the smeg you were thinking?”

Lister hesitated. He had reasons, good reasons. He just wasn’t sure how Rimmer was going to feel about them. “I thought it’d be nice,” he said.

“Nice?” Rimmer shook his head. “For who, exactly?”

Lister shrugged. “You. Me. Both of us, really. I thought it might be like a little holiday; you know, a couple of days on the Costa del Smeg.” He smiled nervously.

The moment he said it, he knew he had done something wrong. Rimmer’s expression became unreadable. “A holiday?” he repeated. “A _holiday_? Well, I’m glad you found being a hologram so much fun, Lister, but quite frankly, that’s a little insulting.”

“It wasn’t the ‘being a hologram’ part that was…” Lister broke off and frowned. “Hang on, what? Why is it?”

“Because this is my _life_ ,” Rimmer told him. “Or the closest thing I have to it, anyway. I don’t have the option of switching back and forth between human and hologram. I’m stuck like this. Forever. So forgive me if it doesn’t exactly seem like a _holiday_ to me.”

Smeg. It occurred to Lister that he should probably have thought about what he was going to say to Rimmer instead of just winging it. Or maybe given him some kind of warning instead of just showing up like this. He sighed. “Okay, yeah. Sorry. I didn’t mean it like that though. And come on, Rimmer, you _know_ I didn’t mean it like that. I just thought you’ve been a bit on edge recently, and maybe you were missing being able to touch someone.”

He reached out slowly, making sure that Rimmer could see what he was doing, and placed a hand carefully on his arm. Rimmer looked down at it, then placed his own hand on top of it. He closed his eyes and shook his head. “I haven’t been ‘on edge’, Lister, and if I _have_ it’s because I’m trying to study, and people keep interrupting me. I was perfectly okay before you were a hologram, and I’m perfectly okay now you’re back in your body. You didn’t have as much of an effect on me as you seem to think.”

“Right,” Lister shrugged. “Fair enough. So, how come you’re still holding on to my hand, then?”

Rimmer looked down at his hand for long enough to confirm that it was indeed still touching Lister’s, then pulled it away and folded his arms, knocking Lister’s hand free. “You can’t just do this, you know,” he said.

“Why not?” Lister asked.

“Well, I mean, of course you _can_ do it, because you did. But you shouldn’t. Is it even safe? What if something went wrong?”

Lister shrugged. “What could go wrong? It’s safe. Kryten said so.”

“Well that’s me reassured,” Rimmer said sarcastically. “If the resident lavatory attendant’s happy with it, I’m sure it’s fine. I mean, it’s nothing important, only your mind.”

“Aww, Rimmer, I didn’t know you cared,” Lister said. “Relax. We never had any problems before, and we’ve done it quite a few times now.”

“Yes, but all those times we only did it because we had no other choice,” Rimmer reminded him. “We switched your mind for Carol Brown’s because we thought the ship was going to blow up. We placed you in a hologramatic copy of your body because you’d been in a coma for half a year and we didn’t know whether you were ever going to recover. It’s very delicate technology, it’s not some video game that you can log in and play whenever it takes your fancy.”

“Okay,” Lister shook his head. “Fine. So what about the time I lent you my body? Or the time you _stole_ it and did a runner? Or the time you stole Cat’s for that matter? They were all totally necessary, no-other-choice type situations were they?”

Rimmer looked away. “Look, we already established I did some things I’m not proud of back then. But that’s no reason to put yourself at risk now, is it?”

“I’m not,” Lister told him. “It’s safe, honestly.”

“And if it isn’t?”

“Smeg! It _is_. I’m not an idiot, Rimmer. I wouldn’t do it if it was dangerous.”

Rimmer stared at him for a moment, thoughtfully. “Okay, fine,” he said. “But even if it _is_ totally safe, I don’t…” he shook his head, turned and paced across the room and back. “I don’t _get_ it. Why would you want to subject yourself to that? What’s the point?”

It wasn’t as much of an ordeal as Rimmer seemed to think. Of course, it was going to be a lot easier knowing that he could return to his body any time he wanted. As Rimmer had reminded him, _he_ didn’t have that luxury. But that was one of the reasons Lister had done it. “I _told_ you the point,” he said. “Because I thought it’d be good for both of us.”

Rimmer shook his head incredulously. “Right. So, what’s the plan? You’re a hologram for a couple of days, and then what?”

“What do you mean?”

Rimmer walked across the room, putting a short distance between them, then turned around to look at Lister. He took a couple of steps closer, but remained at a distance. “Okay, look,” he said. “This stays between us, alright?”

Lister frowned. “Yeah, of course.”

“I’m only telling you this because you’ve got some idea what it’s like. I don’t want you blabbing to Kryten, or worse, to Cat, about it.”

“Yeah, okay Rimmer.” Lister folded his arms and nodded in agreement. “I won’t say a word. What?”

“You’re right,” said Rimmer. “I _have_ been a bit on edge.”

Lister did his best not to smirk. “Well, I hate to tell you this, Rimmer, but that’s not exactly the best-guarded secret in the universe. I _think_ they might have noticed.”

“Yes, well you’re right about why, too.”

They already knew that as well. Of course, they already knew because Lister had already told them, but that had been before Rimmer had asked him not to. He decided not to share that particular piece of information. “Okay.”

Rimmer sighed deeply and sank back into the chair behind the desk where he had been trying to study. “It’s been… difficult. Readjusting. I feel like I did when I first died… well, when I was first a hologram. I mean, it’s not _quite_ as bad, because I already know how to deal with a lot of the things I used to find frustrating, but it’s bad enough.”

Lister nodded. “So you are missing it,” he said.

“No. Yes…” Rimmer shook his head. “Yes, of _course_ I am. But that’s only part of it. What’s worse is I keep… reaching for things. Forgetting, just for a second. And every time I do, It feels like…” he broke off and shook his head. “It doesn’t make any _sense_ , it’s not like I was able to touch anything other than you. It’s like being able to touch _anything_ at all has just confused my brain. I was used to being a hologram, and now it’s like I’m not anymore.”

Lister winced. He placed a hand on Rimmer’s shoulder and squeezed lightly. “Sorry,” he said.

“So, maybe you’re right. Maybe it would be nice to experience physical contact again. In fact, not ‘maybe’, of _course_ it would be. But when you finish your ‘holiday’ and go back to your body, what then? I go back to not being able to touch again. How does that help anything?”

“Because then I’ll do it again,” Lister told him. “We could make it a regular thing. Every couple of months maybe. Or more often. Once a month?”

Rimmer shook his head. “And every time you do it, it’ll only remind me of what I don’t have. It would be easier if you would just let me get used to it again.”

Lister frowned. “Get used to what? Not being able to touch anything ever?”

“Yes.”

“That’s no way to live, Rimmer. Not when you don’t have to.”

Rimmer got back to his feet. “But I _do_ have to,” he said. “And it never bothered you before. You were perfectly content with the way things were for years before any of this happened. Five years, Lister. Not once did you try to do anything to make it better.”

Lister sighed. “I know,” he said. “I didn’t _get_ it then. And anyway, I never even knew this was possible until it happened.”

“And if you _had_ known, I’m sure you’d have been first in line to volunteer, wouldn’t you?” Rimmer said sarcastically.

Lister didn’t reply.

“No, of course you wouldn’t.”

“Because I didn’t get it then. I do now.”

“Right. So you’re doing this out of some kind of a misguided sense of obligation.”

That wasn’t it. Lister shook his head.

“Yes you are. I don’t want that. I don’t want you feeling sorry for me.”

Lister shook his head again. “I don’t,” he said. He did, a bit, but he didn’t think that would be a useful thing to say. “Look, Rimmer, this is as much about me as it is about you.”

“How is it?”

“Because I miss it too!” Lister blurted.

Rimmer frowned dubiously. “ _You_ do? Don’t be ridiculous, Lister. You have a completely functional body, well, apart from the taste buds. Don’t pretend you miss physical contact.”

Lister shook his head. “I don’t,” he said. “But I do miss being able to touch _you_.” He cringed internally as he heard himself say that. A year ago, he would have been horrified at himself. Now, it was just a fact. A really embarrassing fact, but since they were sharing…

Rimmer frowned.

“I keep waking up in the middle of the night and reaching for you,” Lister continued. “And then I remember that you’re not there, and that even if you were, I wouldn’t be able to touch you.”

“Yes, well that’s what being a hologram is like, Lister. That’s what being _me_ is like all the time.”

Lister sighed. He sat down heavily on the bottom bunk, which didn’t move under the non-existent weight of his hologramatic body. Unconsciously, his hand moved to his forehead and he brushed the smooth surface of his ‘H’ with the tips of his fingers. “I know it is,” he said. “It sucks.”

“Yes, well that’s what I’ve been telling you for years.”

“But what I don’t get is, here’s a way to make it suck _less_. So why aren’t you jumping at the chance?”

“Because how long would it last for?” Rimmer asked. “I mean I’m sure you’d start off meaning well enough. You’ll do a few days now, maybe do it again in a month or so, and then again. But then, eventually something will happen on the day you were planning on doing it, and it’ll get put off.”

Lister frowned. “What could happen?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Anything. There’s always some crisis or another around here. Some life threatening disaster or minor irritation, whatever it is, it’ll mean you have to put it off.”

“That’s fine, I could just do it another time,” Lister told him.

“I knew you’d say that. Just do it next week or something, only something _else_ comes up and it gets put off again.”

Lister shook his head. “Rimmer, the only time any of this is going to happen is in your head.”

“Not necessarily, and what if it keeps happening?”

“What, every week?”

“And before you know it, it’s been a year since you last got around to doing it, by which time you’ve forgotten about the whole thing and just got used to things being the way they used to be, so you don’t bother.”

Lister had to give it to Rimmer, he had a very good imagination when it came to crappy things happening to him. “I won’t do that,” he promised.

“No, you probably wouldn’t,” Rimmer agreed. “Knowing you, most likely you’d realise it’s been a year, feel bad about it, and turn up here as a hologram again, just as I’m getting used to the idea that it’s over. And after that, _then_ you’d never do it again.

Lister stared at him in disbelief. “Smeg. You really think I’m selfish scum, don’t you?”

“It’s nothing personal, Lister. I assume that about everybody. It’s just common sense; always assume the worst, and they’ll never let you down.”

Lister rested his head in his hand and shook it from side to side. “Look, I promise I won’t do that, okay? I swear.” Lister said.

Rimmer sat back down at his desk. and began trying to find his place again. “You can’t _possibly_ know that, Lister.”

He supposed that technically that was true, but he definitely didn’t _intend_ to do that. Rimmer was staring intently at the display monitor again, lips no longer moving as he read, but attention definitely focussed there. _Too_ focussed there, actually, to the point that it looked as though he was putting all his efforts into _looking_ like he was reading.

Lister sighed. One last try, and then he would give up. If Rimmer really didn’t want it, he wasn’t going to force it on him. “Come on, Rimmer,” he said. “Don’t be like this.”

“The only thing I’m being is busy, Lister. I have an exam to revise for.”

“But you can do that anytime, right? We’re the only ones here, so it’s not like the promotion board are around to set an exam date. I’m sure you can afford a break.”

Rimmer shook his head. “I’ve already set the date,” he said. “If I’m not ready, I’ll have to wait another six months. And I’m not _due_ a break. Not until…” He stopped and sighed loudly.

“Until when?” Lister asked.

Rimmer scowled at a piece of paper that had been blu-tacked to the wall at an awkward angle with a single blob of blu-tack. Lister could see that it contained a badly drawn grid in smudged pencil on white paper. Each square of the grid had something written in it, but the sides of the paper were beginning to curl into the middle for want of a few extra pieces of blu-tack, making it difficult to see the squares at the sides. “I don’t even _know_ when I’m due a break, actually, because I had to rely on the skutters to make a revision timetable. I ask you Lister, how am I supposed to learn anything when my revision timetable looks like _that_?”

Lister got up from the bunk and leaned in to examine the timetable on the wall. Granted, the handwriting wasn’t as neat as Rimmer’s had used to be, and sometimes strayed over the lines, but then he had seen actual printed books where the writing wasn’t as neat as Rimmer’s had used to be. Rimmer’s revision timetables had always been colour coded, this was strictly monochrome, and there was definitely no shading growing increasingly dark as the exam got closer, but it looked as though it would do the job. He shrugged. “Looks okay,” he said. “I mean, considering we’re talking about robots that can’t even figure out how to pick up a jigsaw piece without a half hour’s coaching.”

“It’s a mess,” Rimmer complained. “Look at it, and tell me what I’m supposed to be revising right now. You can’t, can you? You can’t even tell whether I’m supposed to be revising at all. For all I know, this could be my scheduled recreation time, and I could be missing it because of their shoddy timetabling.

Lister shrugged. “They only do what…” he began, then stopped. They might only do what they were told to do, but that didn’t mean that any errors were necessarily down to the one giving the instructions. The skutters could be _maliciously_ literal. “Why do you even need a revision timetable anyway?” Lister asked. “Don’t you just revise the stuff you need to know?”

“Yes,” Rimmer told him, “But I need to come at it in a structured way.”

“I never bothered with a revision timetable,” said Lister.

Rimmer fixed him with a withering look. “Well you wouldn’t have, would you? When have you ever revised for anything in your entire life?”

“Hey! I have!” Lister told him.

“When?”

He thought about it. “When I did the chefs exam,” he said.

“You failed!”

“Yeah, but I still revised. And when I was at school, I took all my exams there.”

Rimmer nodded, “But you told me you failed them too.”

“I did. Doesn’t mean I didn’t revise for them though, does it?”

“It means you didn’t revise very effectively. Maybe a revision timetable would have helped.”

It occurred to Lister that it would be very easy to say something cruel at that remark, something about how much good it had done Rimmer, the nine times he had failed his exam despite his perfect, colour coded timetable and impeccable handwriting. He didn’t. Instead, he shrugged, and reached for the piece of paper tacked to the wall, intending to redistribute the blu-tack so that at least Rimmer could see it.

His hand passed through it, the tips of his fingers sinking into the wall. The unexpected lack of contact with the wall threw him momentarily off-kilter, and he stumbled half a step forward before he managed to balance himself.

“Forgot about that aspect of your ‘holiday’ did you?” Rimmer said with a tight smile.

Lister shoved his hand in his pocket, embarrassed.

“That serves you right, you know,” Rimmer told him.

Lister grinned. “Yeah, probably. I was trying to help you out, for the record.”

“Right. Well, if you’ll excuse me Lister, I’m supposed to be studying this for another half an hour.” Rimmer hesitated. “Or another half a day. It’s not clear.” He looked back to the screen. “Holly, next page please.”

The display turned to another almost identical looking screen and Lister sighed. He felt very silly. Like some idiot who had made himself into a hologram in the hopes of getting a hug.

“Ok, yeah,” he said. “I’ll ask Kryten to transfer me back.”

Rimmer flinched; a small, barely perceptible movement. He turned to look at Lister. “What?” he asked.

“Back to my body,” Lister clarified.

He saw Rimmer’s eyes flicker from the screen, to Lister and back again several times, before finally settling on Lister. “But you’ve only been a hologram for five minutes. You said a few days.”

Lister folded his arms. “That was when I thought you might stop revising and do something fun. If you’re just going to be sitting there reading the whole time, what’s the point?”

“But…” Rimmer said. “I mean… you’ve done it now. You might as well stick with it for a bit.”

“Stick with it?” Lister shook his head. “Why? You’ve made it very clear that you don’t want me to.”

Rimmer sighed. “Yes, well. That’s true. All of it. But since you’ve gone and done it now, hadn’t you might as well just stay as you are?”

Lister sighed. “Why?”

“Because… Well, because…” Rimmer folded his arms, unfolded them, then folded them again, then sighed. “Because I want you to,” he admitted.

“Really?”

“Yes,” Rimmer told him through gritted teeth. “Well done, you win. I’d just appreciate a bit of notice next time, please.”

Lister hadn’t been trying to win anything, but he would take his victories where he could find them. “So, you want there to be a next time as well, do you?”

Rimmer sighed. “Of _course_ I do. You don’t have to rub it in. A bit of notice this time would have been nice too, by the way. I mean, you must have known when you got up this afternoon that you were going to do this. You probably knew last night too, since I know for a fact that you never come up with schemes within the first few hours of waking up.”

“Schemes?”

“That’s why you were acting oddly last night, isn’t it?”

“I wasn’t acting oddly,” Lister told him. He cast his mind back to the night before, searching his memory for anything that Rimmer might have seen as odd. “Was I?”

Rimmer shook his head in disbelief. “You didn’t have anything to drink, for a start,” he said. “Ever since Kryten told you you could drink again, you’ve barely stopped. And you went to bed early. Well, early for _you_. And before that, you were asking me a lot of strange questions, about how I was feeling and things. So yes, you were acting oddly. In fact, you’ve been acting progressively more oddly for the past week.” He frowned as a thought appeared to dawn on him. “Wait, did you decide to do this a week ago?”

Lister shrugged. “Might have.”

“And in all that time, it never occurred to you to tell me about it? Maybe run it by me, see what I thought to the idea?”

“I wanted it to be a surprise,” Lister told him.

“Well, I don’t like surprises,” Rimmer told him. “I never have.”

That shouldn’t have surprised Lister, actually. Rimmer wasn’t exactly known for his spontaneity.

“Come on,” he said. “Everyone likes surprises. Well, good ones, anyway.”

“Not me,” Rimmer told him. He shook his head. “Not since my seventh birthday.”

Lister sighed. “I know I’m going to regret asking, but what happened?”

Rimmer got up and walked across the room in a few steps, then stopped, turned, and walked back. “It’s a long story,” he said.

Lister shrugged. “Rimmer, you know you’re going to tell me eventually. I’m like a dog with a bone with this stuff. If you don’t tell me, I’m just going to keep asking you until you do.”

“Fine.” Rimmer paced the room again. “It was my birthday. I’d just turned seven years old, and I was so excited, but all day long my parents pretended to have forgotten. It was okay though, because I could _tell_ that something was going on. They were whispering about something, and whenever I walked in the room, they would stop. My dad even came home with a cake from a local bakery. The one that made the best cakes. The ones for really special occasions.”

Lister chewed on one of his fingernails as he listened.

“I played along with the ruse, of course,” Rimmer continued. “Acted like it was just an ordinary day and I had no idea they were up to anything. I did my homework, I helped my mother tidy up the house so it would be ready for everybody arriving. I didn’t once mention that it was my birthday. Anyway, It turned out I was right, something _was_ going on. Do you know what it was?”

Lister shook his head. “Normally, I’d guess a surprise party,” he said. “But judging by all the build up, probably something else.”

“No, you’re right,” Rimmer said. “It was a surprise party, it just wasn’t for me. It was for my brothers.”

“Eh?” Lister frowned. “Rimmer, no matter how many stories you tell me about your childhood, I’m never going to stop being baffled.”

“It does make sense, actually,” Rimmer told him. “My birthday fell very close to the end of one of the Ionian school terms. We’d all brought our report cards home the week before, and my brothers had all finished at the top of their classes. So as a reward, our parents had decided to throw a party for them. They invited a few kids from each of their classes, got a cake, hired a bouncy castle, played games. Unfortunately, I wasn’t doing quite as well academically at the time, so I didn’t deserve a celebration.”

Lister scratched at an itch on the back of his head and tried to think of any way that the story could possibly make sense. “Okay,” he said. “But why'd they do it on your birthday?”

“Well, they didn’t,” Rimmer explained. “Or at least they didn’t intend to. It turned out they really _had_ forgotten my birthday. It was very funny. We laughed about it afterward.” He paused. “Well, they did.”

“That’s horrible,” Lister told him.

Rimmer shook his head. “It wasn’t as bad as all that,” he promised. “My brothers let me join in with their celebration, which was rather sporting of them considering I really hadn’t earned it. But the whole thing left me with this fairly deep-seated distrust of surprises.”

“Yeah,” Lister told him. “I can see why.” He sat back down on the bunk. “Sorry.”

“It’s fine,” Rimmer said quickly. “It was a long time ago. I’m totally over it now. Totally.”

He definitely wasn’t. “Okay, well I’ll tell you next time,” Lister promised him. “Or, ask you. Make sure you’re up for it.”

Rimmer shook his head. “No, surprises are absolutely fine,” he said, “But just make sure you let me know in advance what they’re going to be, and when you’re planning on doing them, and then make sure I’m happy with the arrangement before you go ahead.”

Lister rolled his eyes. “Fair enough.”

“Right,” said Rimmer. “I think that’s probably enough revision for today anyway. Did you have anything planned?”

“Not really,” Lister told him. “I was just going to wing it,”

“That’s you all over, isn’t it, Lister? You don’t like revision timetables, you don’t schedule your surprises properly, and then you make yourself into a hologram with absolutely no plans for what to do next.”

“I wouldn’t say _no_ plans,” Lister told him.

“No? Go on then.”

Lister shrugged. “Well, remember when you kissed me?” he said. “Twice. And the second time, it kinda felt like you meant it. I thought it might be good to see where that went.”

“What?” Rimmer looked nervous suddenly. “What do you mean?”

“Relax. You don’t have to do anything, if you don’t want to. I’m just saying that if you _did_ want to, I’m okay with that. More than okay, actually.”

“Right.” Rimmer tapped his fingers nervously on his own thigh. “So that’s it, is it? That’s your entire plan for this weekend?”

Lister shook his head. “No. I don’t _have_ a plan. That’s what I’m saying.”

“And what if I don’t know if I want to do that?” Rimmer asked him.

“I guess you’ll figure it out,” Lister told him. “One way or another.”

“And if I _do_ figure it out, and I decide that no, I don’t want it to go anywhere? Then what?”

Lister frowned. “What do you mean ‘then what’?”

Rimmer folded his arms. “What I mean, Lister, is if I were to decline your invitation, would you immediately change your mind about this whole idea? Are you doing this only under the assumption that I’m… interested in you, and if it turns out that I’m _not_ , will _you_ suddenly lose interest in me?”

“What?” That hurt, actually. “You really _do_ think I’m scum, don’t you, Rimmer?”

“You know I do. Don’t change the subject.”

Lister sighed. “Look, whatever you want, it makes no difference to me.” he hesitated, then shook his head. “Okay, no. I mean, of course it makes a difference to me but I’ll still want to do this anyway. If you still want me to.” He sighed. This wasn’t going well. “You know what, it might be easier if you weren’t interested, because if you are then sooner or later someone’s going to have to tell Kryten and Cat what’s going on, and I don’t want it to be me.”

Rimmer fixed him with an incredulous stare. “You genuinely don’t mind, one way or another?”

“Well…” Lister shrugged. “I mean, the other stuff would be nice, I’m not gonna pretend it wouldn’t, but I’ve done without it for long enough that I should be used to it by now, right?”

Rimmer frowned, then gave a half smile. “Maybe you were. Until someone went and reminded you. It looks as though I might have done the same thing to you, that you did to me.”

Lister thought about it. In a way, Rimmer was right. “Revenge?” he asked.

“Not intentionally,” Rimmer assured him. He shrugged. “Sorry.”

“Sorry?” Lister shook his head. He reached for Rimmer’s hand and took it in his own. His thumb traced a slow circle on Rimmer’s palm and he took a half-step closer. “Don’t be sorry.”

Rimmer swallowed, then nodded. “I suppose this makes us even,” he said.

“It’s not a competition, Rimmer. It’s just…” Lister shrugged, “It’s just whatever it is. I guess we’ll figure it out as we go. I mean, we’ve got plenty of time.”

Rimmer nodded. With his free hand, he took hold of Lister’s other hand, interlacing their fingers. “Incidentally, Lister,” he said. “If we _do_ take this any further, and for whatever reason we _do_ have to tell Kryten and the Cat, I absolutely and unequivocally nominate you to be the one to do it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to norwegianpornfaerie for beta-ing this fic!
> 
> No guarantees, but I am toying with the idea of writing a sincle chapter sequel to this, set around the time of Legion, so, y'know... watch this space...

**Author's Note:**

> Come say hi on Tumblr  
> [My Red Dwarf blog](http://rimmers-swimming-certificate.tumblr.com)  
> [My main blog](http://prepare4trouble.tumblr.com)


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